Abusing Spectres to the Maximum - Sheaim Succession Game

[jalepeno]

Turn 110: I turned on inhibit growth in most cities so we don't grow any more into unhappiness (like Cheydinhal). Brick apparently didn't get the memo about Code of Laws, he had Bronze Working and Sanitation queued up. Good techs to go after once we actually have an economy. Since we're going to be running negative beakers for a while, we need a dump tech. We will probably want to grab all the researchable techs at some point; I picked Calendar as the one that's probably furthest in the future.

carto makes a great dump tech

Turn 118: the slave ring event. I think picking the second option means we get some free slaves later.

I thought you have to give him what he wants (like 20g), so actually ok not doing it. I agree with OB and great job popping the hut.

Are we still pushing expansion/should we be? I kinda like the idea of grabbing the reagents site to cut Elohim off. I'm also ok with mixing GP pool now: bard for sanitation would be great, but keeping it pure would really slow things down and a trade mission could fund a lot of research.

[BRickAstley]

Ah, sorry about the tech; I had just picked BW real quick on start of turn and meant to swith back but forgot. Thought I put that in my report but oops.

[Mardoc]

I think we can continue expanding at this point. (looks like DaveV agrees, given the settler ready and two more in queues). We're actually either at the point where tech can come on for the Code of Laws sprint, or 1-2 turns away - and once we have Aristo, we can afford any and all cities. Just need to get a little bit of a safety margin for the increase in cost when the new cities are settled.

That said, I don't like the reagents city anymore. It was a great city when it claimed Ivory, but for now it's just hills and Elohim-irritation. We're still pretty far away from a real army. I think if we grab the mana, rice, and fur cities, we'll have all the good stuff in the area and can plan on getting the rest once we have Gates. And actually, given the Elohim presence, I'd back up the Furs city (maybe to 1 SE of the Reagents) and ignore the clams for a while.

Then we can backfill the south, and stop until Bronze is in. Someone's going to have to dotmap the north, but I don't see much that makes sense until we can chop Jungle.

All in all, it looks like we're poised for violent growth, though . Nearly have an economy, after which our only limit to growth will be security - Barbarian peace and the neighbors.

[DaveV]

Yeah, I wouldn't count on winning any culture wars with Einion. And he could kick our butts with that stack I saw in Glens of Killybegs.

The whole southern dotmap may need to be redone. The mana city is garbage, no food at all in first ring. Maybe consolidate incense and furs into a city SE of incense, NE of furs?

Next tech after Code of Laws? Aurorarcher had a good point that we don't need to build culture if we can run artist specialists, and I left us building a bunch of carnivals. We really need bronze working to expand much at all to the north.

Jalepeno - yeah, I have a tendency to confuse Calendar and Cartography. And you're right, you have to pay the captain to get the slaves. 20 gold for 12 hammers or two half-speed workers doesn't seem like a good deal.

We have a trade connection to Einion, and could gift him one of our wines. Worth doing?

[Aurorarcher]

Giving wine could be worth it, should boost our relation a bit. We're at -5 with Einion right now.. That could give us at least +1, maybe more given some time.

Also agree on the furs/reagents city. It's on a hill too, so good border city. I'll try to do a new dotmap for us.

[Aurorarcher]

Report:

Kithra was built somehwere.




Changed some of the city spots. Settled 3 new cities during my session.




Found Clan, they have been doing a lot better than our neighbours, at least according to score.




Looks like Elohim wanted some of that furs/reagents as well.







We beat them by a turn I think:




Might need some garrison here incase Einion gets mad at us. This is why I'm building some warriors in south, we're little short on warriors anyway, not that I want to build more than we need though.

Finally on T128:




Damn, 2 turn anarchy sucks!




Demos before the switch:




After:




Not so terrible anymore. Think I re-arranged some tiles here because demos show no food loss, oops!

It was a good idea to give Elohim the wine, now they're not Annoyed at us anymore!




+3 boost from that gift, not bad.

Empire overview:




Popped borders in North with bards, Grottiburg should be running a bard too get borders popped.

Also I'm running some specialists in our 3rd city:




If we get a bard we can bulb Drama - or if we want to we can launch a GA right when we start to building our Gates to speed that. I'm leaning towards GA if it'll be a merchant, trade mission could be another possibility but I think faster Gates and some quick research would be nice.

I'm building two settlers at the moment. They'll go north, need BW though to make any use of most of the land, should get sugar too; our cities need happy badly. Grabbing hunting for furs would be good at some point (not yet though).

Land in the north:




I'd probably settle 2N of the sheep (if no BW), otherwise go for the pigs. I'd settle pigs 1S of the location marked on the map though.

Here's the save for Jale!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhbk5d4qs3jdc5...dSave?dl=0

[Aurorarcher]

Next I think we want either BW or Mysticism -> KotE.

Saving gold at Cartocraphy again for the moment.

[Mardoc]

Good to see you were able to grab all the south up to Einion's copper city . Aristo now in the bag, too! Things should start getting exciting around now

Damn, 2 turn anarchy sucks!

Um...is there a reason you popped us back into Nationhood? Probably could have saved a turn by sticking with Religion.

If we get a bard we can bulb Drama

If we get a bard, we absolutely should bulb Drama. Free bard at the tech makes that break even! The more interesting question is whether we save the second bard for Sanitation - I lean toward yes. Not just the free food, but also Public Baths for +3 happy/Succubi makes that a very good tech for us.

I'm leaning towards GA if it'll be a merchant, trade mission could be another possibility but I think faster Gates and some quick research would be nice.

I'm pretty sure a trade mission would also help our research rate for a while . The bigger issue is that it'll take a while and be risky to get a Merchant anywhere good. So I'm somewhat uncertain...I guess I lean toward a Golden Age as well. Especially if we keep running Merchant specialists here and there, we can plan a later trade mission to the elves after we've claimed enough of the north to make that a safer shorter journey.

I'm building two settlers at the moment. They'll go north, need BW though to make any use of most of the land, should get sugar too; our cities need happy badly. Grabbing hunting for furs would be good at some point (not yet though).

I'd be inclined to send one south to the last spot down there. It's just easier to establish than a city we have to hack out of the jungle.

Next I think we want either BW or Mysticism -> KotE.

Saving gold at Cartocraphy again for the moment.

I think we want Bronze first. And probably Hunting and Animal Husbandry. 300 hammers per Gate is still a pretty big investment that will be easier if our cities are a couple sizes bigger first. Plus, I don't think we want to put the entire empire to Gates all at once, so we need an outlet for the half of our empire still working on expansion.

[DaveV]

Nice job beating Einion to the fur/incense site! A couple observations from a quick check of the save:

- Einion will sign open borders. Worth doing, IMO, and also worth detailing a couple workers to build a road to the copper city so we get a few foreign trade routes.

- I noticed Lanun borders in the north. Contacting them would give us more information on another of our future foes, and also give us a little bit more known tech bonus.

- I'm glad to see Jonas's score is so close to ours. I'm a lot less worried about losing barb peace now.

- To Mardoc's point about not building Gates all at once: our empire is well configured for swapping tiles around to have food heavy cities (specialists, settlers, workers) and hammer heavy cities (gates, economic and unit enabling buildings, settlers).

- (added with edit) I forgot to move the spider sign, but he's probably sitting one tile to the east of the sign, where he moved to kill our warrior after I popped the hut with him.

[Aurorarcher]

When I revolted my brain was dead I guess, because I did what I usually do... Swap to App/Nationhood at the same, but Nationhood in this game is almost useless to us. Definitely could've saved a turn there, my bad!

And yes, when I said like "maybe pop Drama with bard", I meant that if someone has landed Drama already it might not me worth it and I'd rather use it for a GA. GM trade missions are indeed worthy, especially as AI has pretty big sized capitals, but it's risky.

Good point regarding not building all the gates at once. We need to still expand, that's true - some of our cities don't have much to build right now so those could be working with settlers/workers. I think those food rich or/and hammer poor cities could work on workers, or even settlers. Settlers come out faster from hammer rich cities, though.

Also agree that grabbing Hunting would be nice, +1 happy and additional +1 with Hunting Lodge (not worth it in most cities). AH in my mind isn't that high priority, although we do have a lot of AH resources and the health could also help (but we don't need that just yet). AH is needed to make some of northern cities better.

Maybe BW -> Hunting -> AH -> Myst -> KotE?

EDIT: yeah, should be no trouble losing barb peace. Orcs have high score, but I think someone (Lanun) is way above us in score. If you look at top cities some civs already have capitals at size 12.

Btw, any love for slavery? Could that speed our way to Gates? I haven't used that much in FFH so I have no idea how many pop you can sacrafice and what's the pop/hammer ratio?