This is gonna be good: von Adlercreutz and Taotao

[taotao]

You know what i was thinking, perhpas get comaps optics before guilds so we can start exploring with caravels 4-5 turns earlier.will cost us between 300-450 comerce but i think this might be acceptable.

Hmm, I think I've come to the conclusion that

IF we go for optics before banking and

IF we adopt caste system.

Then I'd like to speed up astro and pop the 2nd GSc on 7th turn of GA.
Ural makes 1st GS in 5t [2t with 6 specs, 2t with 7 specs and last turn with 8 specs (starving down to size 8)]
Alavo goes 3t with 6 specs (working all food specials + gems), 2t with 7 specs (giving up floodplains) and 2t with 9 specs (working 3 best food tiles and ending up on 2/44f without starving)

I'm not sure earlier oceangoing vessels are worth this sacrifice in commerce (and general prod->wealth) and we'd better make sure to have settlers etc ready from the get go if we go this route, but if we do, then I really want to leverage this beeline instead of just getting slightly earlier scouting.

(If we go this route we definitely want to work the lake instead of a specialist so your change would be good)

[mackoti]

You know what i was thinking, perhpas get comaps optics before guilds so we can start exploring with caravels 4-5 turns earlier.will cost us between 300-450 comerce but i think this might be acceptable.

Hmm, I think I've come to the conclusion that

IF we go for optics before banking and

IF we adopt caste system.

Then I'd like to speed up astro and pop the 2nd GSc on 7th turn of GA.
Ural makes 1st GS in 5t [2t with 6 specs, 2t with 7 specs and last turn with 8 specs (starving down to size 8)]
Alavo goes 3t with 6 specs (working all food specials + gems), 2t with 7 specs (giving up floodplains) and 2t with 9 specs (working 3 best food tiles and ending up on 2/44f without starving)

I'm not sure earlier oceangoing vessels are worth this sacrifice in commerce (and general prod->wealth) and we'd better make sure to have settlers etc ready from the get go if we go this route, but if we do, then I really want to leverage this beeline instead of just getting slightly earlier scouting.

(If we go this route we definitely want to work the lake instead of a specialist so your change would be good)

I dont think is worth starving populatian and loosing thta much food for 2 turns faster astro, is not like we get any bonus for beeing first to astro.

And having the info to know were to send the setler is very important as well , yo otherwise you can waste precioous turns on vandering with EI's with stuff in them.The thing which i proposed was a compromise between many things and one of them was working our food .I totaly veto loosing pop for GP pourpose never done it and i dont wanna do it here as well.

And btw those 2 caravels were for getting the circumnavigation if there is any in this mod.

[taotao]

First off, I agree, we don't get a bonus for being first to astro. The reason for me expanding on that option is that you seem very keen on optics and astro (why else insist on caste or suggest optics before banking when that's losing us lots of money?).

And having the info to know were to send the setler is very important as well , yo otherwise you can waste precioous turns on vandering with EI's with stuff in them.

Depending on the layout of the islands we're almost certain to settle first cities without perfectly laid out dot maps anyway [you had an idea of adding explorers (spies are almost worthless with no sight) which would somewhat alleviate the problem, but it still remains when we're bulbing the later naval tech.
We also already know where there is land in two places so we won't send out units that'll cross the world...
...unless we want to:

And btw those 2 caravels were for getting the circumnavigation if there is any in this mod.

Circumnavigation should be on. However, we're almost certainly better off sending out EIs than Caravels if we want to chase this.
"The world" is 100 tiles wide. Sending out two ships it would take a minimum of 50/3=17t for a caravel to cross the distance. For an EI it's 50/4=13t. We, however, know that it'll definitely be some turns more as we need to travel quite far South or North to be able to start going east. We'll hardly go according to the perfect path the first time either and for every mistake the EI gains in usefulness compared to the caravel so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if EIs sent out 6-7 turns later would be quicker to circum-nav than caravels.

The thing which i proposed was a compromise between many things and one of them was working our food .I totaly veto loosing pop for GP pourpose never done it and i dont wanna do it here as well.

We're losing 1pop.
1.
How many pop have we whipped away during this game???

Also, we're working the same amount of specialists any way we do this (so long as every things in a GA) the question is only which tiles we give up and don't work?

In Ural the difference between our approaches is that during 3t I give sugar to Grozny (it still gets worked even!) and during 1t I give up on rice or cows (which can be picked up by Sevastopol).
The city needs to regrow after the GA, but that's why we're doing this in our city with the second highest food surplus.

In Alavo I don't either see us as losing food. What we lose is some GA-production (=wealth?), but even this isn't bad.
3 first turns we're working every bonus tile available apart from desert copper (only giving up at best 1f4c-tiles)
2 next turns we give up floodplains farm (but that gets picked up by Virta anyway)
2 last turns are the only ones that gives up anything of value. Here we lose 2 resources a turn from a selection of sheep, pigs, cows or gems.

[mackoti]

if you present it this way souds far better so turn 8 we could get astro, now lets decide if worth or not.

[mackoti]

if you present it this way souds far better so turn 8 we could get astro, now lets decide if worth or not.

Btw i still consider that caravels would be beter for exploring cause if we go with EI's people from other contitnets wich fight will make peace and concentrate on defending coast and there is a high probability .About spies lets say we met krill do you think he will alow us to go with some units to explore?and gave open borders.??

[taotao]

if you present it this way souds far better so turn 8 we could get astro, now lets decide if worth or not.

Btw i still consider that caravels would be beter for exploring cause if we go with EI's people from other contitnets wich fight will make peace and concentrate on defending coast and there is a high probability .About spies lets say we met krill do you think he will alow us to go with some units to explore?and gave open borders.??

Honestly?
I don't expect anyone on the other continent giving us open borders in a while. Not unless they themselves are getting trade routes (well, possibly if we sweeten the deal with lots of gpt).
What is it you want to uncover with the spy? Personally I'd love to see Gavs capital (probably the only capital that is not coastal) as by the rtr-mod thread it sounds like he could've done something along settling on sugar with 2-3 other food resources in range. This is something I'd like to do see though, it's not something I could use.
And if we're going to drop off a spy we'd better have a certain purpose for him. Before he's uncovered all of the other continent we'll be long past satellites...
(ask yourself this as well: Serdoa is one of our biggest threats in this game and where he has put his cities holds great strategical value to us, why haven't we sent a spy to his lands yet?)

Do you really think that just because someone who's further away than your neighbours neighbour is sending a scouting "galleon" that you'll stop an ongoing war and reinforce cities? In previous pb's people have spotted empty cities all the time with naval units and only on rare occasions have they been called on it. And what if they did build more units and reinforced their coast? I'd say that the only time this would be bad is if we actually are going to come razing some important city a few turns later...
We don't mind 12-15 city empires far away from us. Eventually we'll out-tech them. They're more dangerous if they get to eat a neighbour in peace and suddenly become 20+ city empires.
Also, showing them EIs means that they know we've already got the seas. If they we're planning on expanding into the islands they know that we might already be there, making it more costly. They'll be at a military disadvantage all the way to frigates.
If you want to we could also fill the 4th cargo spot with a sword. That way if you see a Krill city only defended by a warrior you'll get a shot at annoying him...

So is all this worth it?
My gut says that the best option might still even be serfdom and astro turn after end of GA, but I don't think earliest possible astro will be far behind. And doing things slightly more to the extreme, trying odd strategies, that's what I consider fun in this game and I do believe we've already said at some point that one of our goals here would be to have fun?

[taotao]

Oh shit, forget about Krill, the one guy that we need to look out for in this game is Gavagai.
He started off moving his capital to some ridiculously good spot.
He founded Judaism that is one of the worlds two most spread religions.
He picked off Grimace without a problem.
He probably built ToA that will give him a shrine eventually.
He's Organized.
And now he's lifted a city off Tsargon who is quite likely the weakest player left in this game.

[mackoti]

In the end ii think you right gaining more production and starting those knigs will be beter.We still can get exploring 4-5 turns before getting astro with 1 ,2 caravels whcih is nice and going serdform we gain far more production and perhaps even getting some infra up.

And more than that i will not starve my cities and will have huge production.

[mackoti]

After some more math i think we will finish banking iin 1 turn so i think would be beter to go caste so we get that bulb faster.That means astro 6 turns faster which is alot we can slow build a handful of Ei's in that time.
So my final vote is to go caste and get sciebtist out in 8-9 turns.And we will discover banking so we wont need to build any wealth after that and can start on knigs, setlers whatever we need.

[mackoti]

Oh shit, forget about Krill, the one guy that we need to look out for in this game is Gavagai.
He started off moving his capital to some ridiculously good spot.
He founded Judaism that is one of the worlds two most spread religions.
He picked off Grimace without a problem.
He probably built ToA that will give him a shrine eventually.
He's Organized.
And now he's lifted a city off Tsargon who is quite likely the weakest player left in this game.

You right , he got 2 more cities this turn,lets hope his economy is not very strong.I think the wanable is the weakest but he is mostly died.