Abusing Spectres to the Maximum - Sheaim Succession Game

[DaveV]

Probably worth whipping a work boat right away in cities that have unworked seafood (e.g., Skeggi, Kvellig, Galveholm).

[Mardoc]

A couple first impressions:

Oooh, we should get our first Planar Gates built in my turnset. Granted, those particular cities don't yet have synergy-buildings...but maybe I can fix that. Still at the low-AC 5%/turn rate, but something>nothing.

Wow, we're in clear first place...more than 150% of Hannah's score.

We still have barbarian peace, somehow, presumably because of someone in the fog. We don't have any idea of our safety margin, though. I consider putting a bunch of warriors in queues, but end up refraining. With the Gates about to open, we don't need to keep the peace much longer. And we haven't expanded much recently, so we don't have any large score increases coming.

T181: Much noise, as all our warrior gain Bronze. That'll help ease my mind about the barbs, too . Steinvik finishes our very first Gate!

T182: The Bone Palace is built in a far away land . I guess Marble would have come too late regardless.

Steinvik whips in a Public Baths. That should give us a chance to start collecting Succubi.

T183: Huzzah!
NSFW:

On literally the first possible turn we're eligible, we get our first Gate unit! Now we can legally attack someone. It may not be wise just yet, but we're allowed.

I'm going to start prepositioning units near the barbs. We may still have barb peace, but it can't last much longer. Best to be ready when it fails.

Bruma whips in its Planar Gate as well. I'm being spendthrift to get the Gates started, because they'll run on autopilot once they're done.

T184: Jonas demands one of our spare wines. I refuse. He's far enough away that he probably can't hurt us, at least no more than Beeri can.

Maaybe that succubus is adding to my machismo levels a bit too

Sailing comes in, and we do have Pearls available One of the nearby cities will need to pause its build for a workboat; I choose Grottiburg. That will be whipped for overflow back into the Gate, so it shouldn't lose much time.

We also immediately gain a bunch of trade routes, including a handful of 3c routes. Vamps and Elves have some big cities, far away.




You can also see the new city that Jalepeno set up for me to found, starting its growth on a Gate.

I decide to take a turn to slip in Animal Husbandry. It's cheap. If we're going to keep leaning on Slavery (and I see no reason not to), then Smokehouses will be valuable. Also, we're going to be virtually guaranteeing Blight at some point; we'll definitely want to have all the health we can get by the time that rolls around.

T185: We turn out to have two Horses. One at our tiny SE city, and one at the capital. I hurry to improve the capital horse, that'll cut a couple turns off the Catacombs




Meanwhile, it's back to saving gold.

T186: Arendel adopts Guardian of Nature. We can expect her to get much scarier now.

T188: Aquae Sucellus is built in a distant land.

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All in all, it was a builder turnset. In particular, gate-building. I only founded the two cities Jalepeno prepared for me, built no additional settlers or workers, and my city growth netted out close to zero with whipping.

I picked up Sailing and Animal Husbandry, and brought us back to ~600 gold in the bank - enough that we could now grab Writing, or else keep saving for Corruption of Spirit. Now that Gates are coming in, I do see a purpose to starting to boost the AC: it would pay off immediately in a higher Gate unit production rate. On the other hand, our economy is still pretty fragile. We could definitely use the boost from Trade.

We now have six Planar Gates, five of which have either a carnival or public baths to go with. We've got another batch of gates approaching the point where they can be whipped to completion. On top, I'm starting to get optimistic about our chances for the Catacomb Libralus; we're down to 16 turns there.

We only got that first Succubus, no further units, but our odds should be getting pretty good now. Even with the AC only at 6, we should have 25% odds of a unit every turn now - I'm a little bit surprised I didn't get any more units in my turnset. I expect we'll have an actual army by the time my turn comes back around.

I'm really not sure on the best route from here. We have three big projects that could each take most of our civ's focus: finishing up Gates and starting to push the AC, claiming the last of the empty land nearby, or fixing up our economy. Obviously my inclination is to keep pushing the Gates hard, because I feel we need the security, but either of the other two is reasonable. Or, of course, we could put moderate effort into all three. Cities with gates + one synergy building can go back to economic focus; extra synergy buildings won't help until we start getting our unit counts close to their caps.

The Save is Here.

Brick, have things calmed down enough for you that you can play, or would you prefer a skip? It hasn't actually been that long since your last turnset.

[BRickAstley]

My wife is having some health problems that's taking a decent amount of my time, so you should probably leave me out of the rotation til further notice.

[Mardoc]

I'm sorry to hear that, Brick. I hope she recovers fully.

[DaveV]

Yes, very sorry to hear that, Brick. Best wishes for a full recovery for her. I hope you have a good support system; it's tough on the healthy spouse too.

On a more prosaic note, I'll plan to play at lunchtime today.

[Mardoc]

I hope we're at least giving you a fun distraction when you can take a break, Brick.

Something I noticed the last turnset: The Elegy is only 200h in v11. That's actually reasonable, especially at low AC: for the price of a Gate, we can double the effectiveness of all our existing Gates. (well, maybe we need two Elegy's - but that's still two Gates of cost to double six+). Sure, the Elohim may try to counter us, but I'm pretty sure the civ with 20 cities can outproduce the civ with five

I don't know if it's worth the effort to build the Elegy for more than that first bump to AC10, but I think it could be worthwhile now if we have any excess production - particularly if we're picking up Trade before Ashen Veil.

[Tasunke]

Aye, I've had to deal with that sort of thing a few years ago, sorry about that mate.










who has the save? i opt to enter rotation

[DaveV]

Here's my report, such as it is. The print screen key on my laptop keyboard doesn't work for Civ, and the USB keyboard I'd been using for a print screen button stopped working. So these are the two screenshots you get:



I used the whip with utter ruthlessness, to keep our score down and because we need more buildings (especially courthouses). This includes a 7-pop whip to complete Catacomb Libralus in the capital as my last action in the set .

I finished Trade, putting the overflow beakers into Mathematics and then switching back to Cartography for more negative beakers.

I popped four Chaos Marauders early in the set, then the RNG stopped cooperating.



Mardoc: Elegy of the Sheaim is 300 hammers. Prophecy of Ragnarok is 500; I started that in one of the southeast cities since it seemed like a slower but better way to raise the AC.

[Tasunke]

I got teh save (if no one minds) --- > How many turns do I play?

[Tasunke]