[Spoilers] Pindicator accepts his fate

[pindicator]

Turn 043

gsorel planted his 5th city; Nicolae his 3rd. And we also come in with our 3rd city:



To be honest, it's been so long since I read the books that I forget which islands are important in the stories and which are not. So... let's just pick one near Gont and call it good.

Horse pasture will be done next turn. Also up north the worker out of Karego-At finished and put a turn into a road on his way to pasturing the cows. And potentially roading the cows.

I did some number crunching on how fast we can get a chariot swarm going, and then I realized that I don't have BW in yet for chopping. So I'm not sure what I can get anymore, but I don't think a rush is going to happen. We'll see, but I don't think I can get more than a single chariot ready by t50. But I could also have 4 chariots ready by t52. I'm pretty sure t52 is too slow though.

[pindicator]

Turns 044 & 045

Okay, I've figured it out. And I thought about it a bit more, and we're going to go for the Chariot rush.




Nyles had the copper mined on turn 44. No road. No roads visible anywhere. In order for him to get ahead of us here he'd have to have 2 workers roading to the 2nd city. So far we haven't seen any roads, and only 1 worker. My gut says he's developing poorly and doesn't have but 2 workers, probably chopping into his next settler -- he did just whip a city on t43. I don't think he's putting a high priority on roads and connecting cities, unless he's sweeping the whole thing way to the west out of sight ... but that's just paranoid to think that, really.

My workers are circled in blue; I moved workers to start chopping forests at Gont and Andran next turn. I switched Gont and Karego-At to chariots and decided against building a chariot at Andran as well, because it won't get there in time. This is a quick strike attack: it either works or it doesn't, there really isn't a point in having a lot of follow up units because Nyles will be either at a single city or we'll be asking for peace and slinking back tail between legs. I did goof a bit for the worker at Karego: I wanted to delay the chop there so that the chariot comes out on the last possible turn and to reach the staging tile. Let's keep the power graph as low as possible for as long as possible. The screw up was that I wanted to chop that plains hill tile but mis-counted the worker turns to line everything up. It wasn't until I was in the middle of writing this and re-counted everything that I caught the error. Been a bit run down lately, to be honest, but it's fixable. Just have to chop the staging tile instead of the plains hill (staging tile is the silk west of Karego-At).

We'll start chops at Andran (worker) and Gont (chariot) next turn; Andran times nicely in that the chop finishes the turn that culture comes over that forested hill. Then the worker at Andran and the newly chopped worker will get the pigs, fur, ivory, and rice all improved. Want to grow that city as fast as possible. Chariot will finish at Gont on t47 and the chop from the worker there will actually get a 2nd chariot out t48. Both chariots head north t49, move to the staging tile t50. Worker at Karego will finish it's chop on t49 and then start a road on the cow t50.

t51 is magic hour.

I don't know when I'll swap to Slavery... Probably not until after this thing with Nyles is settled.


EDIT: I guess I changed my mind to go for it because I'm doing a bit of a half measure - I'm still able to have Andrad chop a worker out and then use those workers to get the city up and running. Going to have to put Gont and Karego on units whether the quick strike succeeds or fails, though.

[Thoth]

[pindicator]

Using this dead time at work to calculate some battle odds in excel:

Chariot v Warrior (in capital, fortified): 33.3% odds to win
Chariot v Warrior (same as before but with 81hp -- amount that one hit by a chariot in the previous scenario would leave): 80.9%
Chariot v Warrior (in capital, no fortify bonus): 65.4%

Yes, it's a slow day at work

[Krill]

Email Cyneheard for his old combat calculator.

[pindicator]

Oh I have it at home. I just needed to kill some time on a slow day. Still have 40 min to kill too...

[pindicator]

Turn 046

I'm ready to bitch about copper placement now...



Both coppers are closer to Nyles (4 and 5 tiles) than me (6 tiles each). If we hadn't pushed for an aggressive 2nd city...

The south looks a lot more evenly distributed:



Conveniently it's on the forested hill tile that I just moved to!

Copper aside, I set the workers at Gont and Andran to chop. The worker at Karego moved to the copper hill and will chop next turn -- turns out I hadn't screwed up like I thought I had and I did have that turn available to move to the hill; I definitely want to chop that forest to speed up hooking up copper.

Nyles settled his 3rd city last turn. And if you look at his copper, there's now a road under it. So he has it hooked up to his 2nd city. But I also have research visibility on him now: he's teching Pottery. I feel good seeing that. And really, copper doesn't matter for our plan to hit his capital. It will make finishing him off more difficult though...

[Commodore]

Seems a mite churlish to complain; that's excellent news! Both copper already settled, with workers aboard.

[pindicator]

I dunno, if Nyles had picked a faster combo he could have easily blocked from both copper resources and most of the food. We had to settle a city we called "pink dot" in order to get one of them.

Having so many copper tiles helps mitigate the position of any one tile though, so I agree that was a good design choice.

[Ichabod]

I'm really interested in reading the Earthsea series, but I never found it around here. I'll have to import it.