[PB25-SPOILERS] The Lunacy of the Reign of HAK Continues

[MindyMcCready]

Nothing big to report this turn, other than that the scout survived...though just barely. He'll be taking the next 8 turns to heal.
Finished Agri, so starting the Rice farm now. Can't wait for the Gold mine to finish in a couple turns.
Grimace also finished a Tech...and with him knowing where his Copper is, I'm betting he went for Wheel. It's what I'm betting pretty much everyone would have done after BW.

Also Commodore also settled his 3rd city last turn. So that's GJ, retap, Commodore, & us all with 3rd city right now.

8T is a very long time,.. especially for a unit that's going to die to the first non-animal barb which I'm sure is coming soon. Other options to staying in place:
1. Barb busting. Pick the spot with the most visibility to keep barbs from spawning there.
2. Try to bring him back. A scout is very valuable, non-threatening eyes past our C2 location. Eyes are a very large deterrant to aggression.
3. Take our chances and see if we can uncover a few more tiles to our West.

I'm not looking closely enough at the map to determine which choice is best,...its just my feeling that 8T later our scout will make 1 or 2 moves and then die to a warrior or archer which basically gains us nothing.

On that note, we need to act as if we're blind around the south end of Grimace. No units in that area until we're ready for our move. Don't want to tip him off that that's disputed territory.

Overall, looking good!

[MindyMcCready]

Last blab.

I think that the barrcks in C2 should probably wait in favour of more workers. Use those forests for expansive bonus and to make a worker or two and then chop out the barracks with said workers.

The sheep is very valuable of course, but not that much more than a GHM building expansive workers. So I would advise postponing that build. We'll need workers desperately to
infrastructure all of our key city locations that we`re gunning for.

We have a warrior in Hungry. We`re blind right now NE of that city. If 2 axes show up playing EOT we`d probably lose that city. So I would advise moving that warrior forward a couple of tiles if you don`t think that`ll get him killed by the bear.

As I mentioned, C3 should be growing onto gold as soon as possible rather than building a worker.

[Krill]

Can you rephrase that question in a manner that doesn't include a billion spoilers?

:LOL: How about: do you feel that Archery is too cheap right now?

No. The increase in the cost of Hunting and the general increase in tech requirements to unlock the ancient era tools counterbalance the decreased cost of Archery. Specifically, cost of Hunting+Archery is lower in base BtS than it is in RtR. You may argue that as Hunting is now necessary due to pastures that makes the relative cost for Archery lower, but that ignores that all the other requirements still exist, ie you can't ignore BW, AH, Pottery etc.

[HitAnyKey]

I had run a few different SIMs previously between Happy starting with Worker or starting with something else. I eventually decided on Worker, to get out another needed worker while making it so the other two cities can grow easier. Basically decided, getting the other cities to grow and such as more important than getting Happy to grow. So what I ended up doing was timing Happy to grow after it got it's Granary in place. Suppose I can try doing another couple SIMs with alternate options for what to have it build, such as switching to WB at this point.
But in 2 turns when the Gold mine completes, I have it scheduled that Happy works the Gold (to speed up the Worker) and Sleepy uses the Crab to speed up it's growth to Size4 when it'll start work on the next Settler. Keeping Happy on the Crab until it grows would likely delay that Settler and I didn't want to do that. But I'll have to try doing a sim of that to doublecheck.

And yeah, that whole Stone across the water from capital thing is basically the same as ours. So that might be one of the "balance" things the mapmaker did for everyone. Which would also mean that our Stone is someone else's backdoor.

Borsche does have his second city. If you open up the googledoc, I have a tab called "Score Tracking". It lists everything I can guess at for all the civs. Borsche got his 2nd city on T33 (as a reference, we got ours on T30).

[HitAnyKey]

Last blab.

I think that the barrcks in C2 should probably wait in favour of more workers. Use those forests for expansive bonus and to make a worker or two and then chop out the barracks with said workers.

The sheep is very valuable of course, but not that much more than a GHM building expansive workers. So I would advise postponing that build. We'll need workers desperately to infrastructure all of our key city locations that we`re gunning for.

We have a warrior in Hungry. We`re blind right now NE of that city. If 2 axes show up playing EOT we`d probably lose that city. So I would advise moving that warrior forward a couple of tiles if you don`t think that`ll get him killed by the bear.

As I mentioned, C3 should be growing onto gold as soon as possible rather than building a worker.

As I mentioned before, I ran multiple different sims. These also included doing some without doing the Barracks and some with doing it. My currently path has the Barracks being whipped on T46 while a worker going up there to chop one of the forests. On T49 the chop completes such that our 4th worker is done on T50. Worker5 ends up getting completed by Happy on T52. So by T52 we have 5 workers and 4 cities. Throughout my sims, I didn't seem to be lacking in improved tiles for the cities to be working. I also would rather not put chops into things like Barracks, etc, when putting chops into workers get us such a nice bonus. I do have Worker5 chopping the Granary in Happy, and plan to chop a Monument (or similar) in Marble city so that we start getting culture asap for when Grimace settles down there. But otherwise most of my chops (except for some that go into Settlers) are scheduled for going into Workers.

The decisions for Barracks at Hungry and Worker at Happy came at times when you were unavailable for discussion and helping with sims. But if you have some time this weekend or such, we can run some more SIMs to decide which route is better.

[MindyMcCready]

Ok. I'll defer to you and your sims. Sorry to make you type out long explanations.

If you feel that you've got all my points under control please feel free to say something like "have observed that already,...got it covered". Generally, I'll be happy to know that the stuff I'm blabing about has been noticed and not overlooked.

If I don't feel satisfied, I'll push harder and then we might need to chat or something but generally I'm just looking for some check assurance that you've noticed the things I'm pointing out.

[HitAnyKey]

Ok. I'll defer to you and your sims. Sorry to make you type out long explanations.

If you feel that you've got all my points under control please feel free to say something like "have observed that already,...got it covered". Generally, I'll be happy to know that the stuff I'm blabing about has been noticed and not overlooked.

If I don't feel satisfied, I'll push harder and then we might need to chat or something but generally I'm just looking for some check assurance that you've noticed the things I'm pointing out.

No, don't ever simply "defer to my sims". I could be totally off on whether this plan is best for us. And the typing out the long explanations even helps me run through the thoughts again. You have made me question them a bit more again....I already had been questioning them back when I made the decisions. The decision of whether to have Hungry start the Barracks (to then 2-pop whip it when the city reaches size 4) rather than grow on a Warrior/Spearman to then overflow into a Worker was a decision that was almost a flip of a coin because I didn't have any more time for doing sims or thinking about it when the time to make the decision came about.
I'll make a new sandbox later and try to do a sim of switching Hungry off of the Barracks and on to other things to see what that might change.
Also see what happens if I now switch Happy from the Worker to a WB to make it grow sooner and what kind of delay that might put on when Sleepy gets to grow and finish it's Settler. But we'll likely have another turn going into both the Barracks & Worker before I can finish any comparisons.

[MindyMcCready]

:LOL: Don't worry, I wasn't going to stop bothering you. Some of my comments are knee-jerk reactions rather than carefully thought out advice,..so those ones don't always need to be carefully reviewed and replied to if you think you've got it under control.

I've added a tab to your spreadsheet with an arrangement for city plant times. It's a quicker view to get a picture of who's doing well and who's falling behind.

[HitAnyKey]

Speaking of city plants....do you like what I've kind of marked out so far? Anything you think we might want to be more aggressive with? Not sure when we want to think about pushing beyond the mountains towards Grimace. I hadn't really thought about trying to Pink Dot him...is that even really an option? Not sure where we would even go if we wanted to attempt it, assuming we even beat him to that area.
If we have a city on our planned hill, I assume he'll likely plant a city 3E of it. If he gets quick religion spread there, that'll start pushing against our borders if we don't take that city quick enough.
I believe us planting on the marked hill prevents him from settling 1N of the Marble, which if I were him that'd be my ideal spot. So that at least makes him have to settle on flat ground, since the only other hill in the area that could even get the Marble would be on top of the Sheep out there. Which is just silly, and still needs a border pop to get the Marble.

[MindyMcCready]

Speaking of city plants....do you like what I've kind of marked out so far?

When I first looked it was with the lens that we wouldn't get any of the land to the West of our SW mountains. Before, seeing that Borsche is cut off I didn't take the dot map too seriously because he would be beating us to a number of those locations. I'll have to take another look under this new exciting lens.

The other thing to say about Borsche and/or us really,...I think that in 10-20 turns from now we would have been getting Sailing to land that stone city. If it turns out that there is some degree of parallel happening, then we likely would have done so with little knowledge that this land 'belongs' to someone else. So we may have some opportunity there as well but we'll need mobility in our forces to achieve any of that.

Anything you think we might want to be more aggressive with? Not sure when we want to think about pushing beyond the mountains towards Grimace. I hadn't really thought about trying to Pink Dot him...is that even really an option? Not sure where we would even go if we wanted to attempt it, assuming we even beat him to that area.

The only active intent that I have towards Grimace is trying to nab whatever marble city he plants. Our C4 city location is very key to that since it will force him onto flatland while getting us the best resources. This is more viable than even before since we now only have 3 choke points to be worried about (beyond regular wandering barbs). So we land that city and hold. Grimace is then cut off from that island to the SE which becomes ours. That 3tile lake creates further problem for him in settling,...he'll have to garrsion enough on both sides of that lake which will slow him down a bit. We'll also have naval mobility options through those 2 lakes.

Everything else we wait for. We wait for the 3-way Battle Land to heat up. Between Retep + Commodore + Grimace,...Grimace is going to be the target. With Grimace weakened, then we make our move. In the meantime we keep expanding to our sizable land getting our UB and settling this very good piece of land while keep looking for other opportunities.

If we have a city on our planned hill, I assume he'll likely plant a city 3E of it. If he gets quick religion spread there, that'll start pushing against our borders if we don't take that city quick enough.
I believe us planting on the marked hill prevents him from settling 1N of the Marble, which if I were him that'd be my ideal spot. So that at least makes him have to settle on flat ground, since the only other hill in the area that could even get the Marble would be on top of the Sheep out there. Which is just silly, and still needs a border pop to get the Marble.

Yes, this was my thinking too; 3E of us. So we need to be prepared for some quick whips and/or to find horses as soon as possible to make that happen. Animal Husbandry is already very high on our list due to elephants and furs so it's probably our next tech after Pottery I'd guess.

While I'm on the topic of naval mobility,...that city that captures corn + copper, cows, wines close to Borsche,...that allows us full naval mobility from our ocean to the southern one. We really want a city right there.

Lastly,...we make no moves onto the stone 'island' until we've got a better understanding of the map. If we can't get 4 cities up there (that can largely protect themselves) then we don't touch it. This will be risky for our 3 founding cities,...but we're going to have a lot of competiting priorities and this one seems lowest to me.