The Pen vs The Sword (Gandhi of NA)

[Ceiliazul]

And here's one of the cities with excessive Theocracy preparation:

That's pretty impressive if you've managed it without any hammer decay... I have tried that in the past and the execution seems so much messier than the theory.

nice GNP, even if it is a golden age. One thing this massive game warps is how impressive you can be on the local stage while still being a bit behind the overall leaders. It's almost like there's 4 or 6 different regional civ games going on, but the demos are global. Pretty cool from my perspective, but surely frustrating from yours.

[The Black Sword]

Went ahead and revolted to Theo/Nat this turn. I pretty much drafted off coast or plains hills for this turn at least. At worst, I could gain maybe 30h by delaying the revolt a turn. This way I get to start completing all those build queues, with overflow +GA production, I expect to be 1 turning units for a while. Also means I get 1 extra GA turn in Bureau, which makes up a bit.

I also rolled the low odds artist in Kesorak, which is mildly annoying. There's a small chance I roll another artist this turn and screw things up:


I'm not 100% sure what I'd do, probably force the next GP out of Hornshark and continue with my trade mission.

nice GNP, even if it is a golden age. One thing this massive game warps is how impressive you can be on the local stage while still being a bit behind the overall leaders. It's almost like there's 4 or 6 different regional civ games going on, but the demos are global. Pretty cool from my perspective, but surely frustrating from yours.

Nah, I'm enjoying it. It is a funny experience though. If I was just playing a game on my continent, with Dazed and Joey, I'd definitely be going up the safer, probably better, Edu -> Economics route. But with the big 4 so far ahead, I feel I have to take riskier chances like this.

One thing I haven't done a lot of in this thread is musing about the general map and game layout. Now that I'm finally exploring another continent I've been thinking a bit more about that. Why am I so far behind the leaders and also, why is there such a big difference in food compared to other stats(this is true, even without the GA distorting things).

Things have not gone perfectly for me this game, that's for sure. I've had the equivalent of 2 cities razed, but both quite late so as not to effect the snowball much. I've made a number of minor management errors. Furungy was a costly neighbour to deal with, but at least our arms race didn't get up to plako/xenu standards. Despite the fact I managed to conquer him, I got only half of this land(possibly less, since I have a feeling he was supposed to get some islands to the south) and most of what I did get was severely gimped by Dazed's culture bomb. Still, I think part of problem is that I have the ultimate long term investment. None of the leaders have double late game traits. Additionally, I'm pretty sure I'm in the 'more absolute land, lower resource density' zone, which exacerbates this. Finally, being on the north coast was also a subtle nerf. I wasn't able to settle any cities on the south coast until Furungy fell, so it was difficult to send out scouts to meet people. Even in the early game, known tech bonus is a big deal here. Considering my beeline to CoL for example, I might have got a fairly big bonus on Math. As for the food difference; I think that's a symptom of my situation. Other players used their early bonuses to grow a lot more population than me, but they don't have much land to work. So that population is working things like coast which don't do much for the other demos. My little exploration into plako's lands seems to confirm this theory. Of course, 3 of the big 4, 2 Fins and the Colossus have 3 commerce coast so it's a much better deal for them. And food is co-incidently BGNs weakest demographic.(and of course, I assume they're the 4 people with more land than me).

It will be interesting to read the threads after the game to see if there was a turning point where the leaders really opened up that gap or if it was the culmination of lots of small mistakes.

[The Black Sword]

We might not have Education yet, but we know Calculus!



That deserves a celebratory golden age. Of course Calculus gave us a head start on market arbitrage and look what our books cooked up:



That's actually ... pretty disappointing. I thought we'd get the full trade route value but I guess the distance formula takes into account the relative map size like it does with maintenance. Still it's enough gold for our purposes, we can hit Military Tradition just as the account runs dry, so I didn't think it was worth while delaying things for a potential bigger payout.

Demos now I'm only running a couple of specs:


Further point; Dazed has had a trireme asleep beside Furungy's old capital of Arcanclave for a good number of turns now. This turn, it disappeared. But, I have vision of every tile it could have moved too. Is he deleting units? Now I can safely hook up my fish!

[The Black Sword]

My spike is beginning to show:


Joey's noticed, re-offering Wheat for Wheat, scouting me with workers(I suppose they're pretty cheap 2-movers for an EXP civ ). Dazed doesn't seem to be using the OB to search for my stack yet, but he is strengthening his defenses. A castle in Front Line and garrisons are getting bigger. I'm feeling a bit pessimistic.



The new city of Loris river, is making me money. This is actually a pretty important filler, it'll be the main city in the area since it can make the most out of the land with a Levee and Lighthouse. Also of note is the sheep tile, the first I managed to reclaim peacefully.

I found Xenu's capital too:


Whoops, didn't realise that was so close!

[Ceiliazul]

I found Xenu's capital too:


Whoops, didn't realise that was so close!

[The Black Sword]

I can't remember if I said it anywhere, but I consider that city plant for the fish a mistake now, even before I found his capital. The fish was never going to repay the cost of garrisoning the city. I really wanted a port in the south but I probably couldn't have used it while Xenu remained hostile.

Moving onto the current turn, my army is rapidly increasing:


That's almost 150k in the last two turns and with 2 more turns of drafting to go, I'll probably hit top power by the end. The approval rate is nice, I'm top despite 4t of hard drafting. My MFG is pretty amusing too, I'm doing no wealth building and I'm also drafting 400hpt, blowing everyone away there!

I'm going to attack Dazed on T165. That gives 4 turns for me to get to Cuirs, and 2 turns for the Cuirs to reach their staging points. I can save gold for the first of those 2t and upgrade 10-15 Knights on the second too.

Meanwhile Dazed and Joey picked up Education, which is great news, need 4 more to get the full bonus. Come on rest of the world, I had faith in your research ability, don't let me down!

Last peaceful city for a while, another Levee spot:

[The Black Sword]

The last draft is over and we're back to the big B:


Meanwhile dtay picked up Mil Trad too, giving me a small bonus. It made me count up and see he's 20k beakers ahead of me.

We're up to 3rd in soldiers, still have the Cuir turn coming up:


And my NE finally completed on turn 160:

[Ceiliazul]

72gpp aint bad!

[Ceiliazul]

Who got Parthenon?

[The Black Sword]

Boldly picked it up, along with TGL and most of the goodies along that line. Paya is still unclaimed amusingly enough.