RMOG: Renaissance Men of Genius

[WarriorKnight]

We may yet be able to beat REM towards the southwestern island between us, as they have not settled on that coast yet, right?

As of t115, no. Everyone except Al has 5 cities atm, and we know the location of all but mackoti and plako's 5th.

Beyond that, the northwestern lake city is a very solid location that we've perhaps overlooked. We do need to settle towards Al eventually as well. The southwest fur city is also really solid. I haven't looked at the south in awhile, but maybe the sugar city down there?Beyond that, the "aggressive" plants we're considering are: Forward city towards REM, forward city towards Mack, and of course the 6 islands we want

Aside from whale city, the main spot in the S I'm looking at is the stone city for Oxford. Aside from that, the only thing down there that is useful is the crabs. Every other resource there is a surplus. We may want to consider trading for resources, but with ND in hand and the majority of the map unsettled I don't think we need to worry about that for a while.

- I think we still settle that clam backfill, just because:

A. No wasted tiles
B. Island city will have another clam to work
C. It will probably be more efficient to try and split off a the gold from the island city, as the island city will probably have trouble working them all on its own. This decision can await seeing what's on the island though.

Posting for reference:



Clam city is probably right from an economic perspective, my main concern is if mackoti lands a mounted stack NE of the deer it can fork 3 cities. We may have to take that risk though.

- I'm not entirely happy with what the Mack front city does to our dotmap, as it wastes three grassland (2 riverside) on the subcontinent that can't be retrieved except with a backfill city. Then again, I prefer having a really good blocker city towards Mack (and additionally one that serves as a canal. I don't have a solution for this at the moment (I stared at it a lot last week being annoyed), but just wanted to point out that the tile wastage is there.

Should we consider moving mack border NW? We grab 2 new grassland, and we can always create our own canal by forting a desert. It does leave us more vulnerable defensively, but like above it may be necessary.

About what time frame are you wanting to flip into a golden age?

I don't have a specific time for a GA down yet. My primary goal for the first GA, aside from ensuring a GS, is to time it to get a free switch into Representation. I don't have a good idea of when we'll hit Constitution, but it won't be anytime soon. Nationalism is a pre-req, we'll definitely want Astro before then and maybe Gunpowder/MT too.

[oledavy]

I just have a moment to post today.

We should talk about the pros and cons of moving the Mack front city over the weekend, or see if we can make an adjustment somewhere else that leads to less wasted tiles.

The news about the islands is disappointing - I had thought that Mardoc simply had left no copper on the map due to its distorting effect with SoL. I imagine there are gems on the other half of that island, as that seems to be an unlikely resource to delete from the game entirely. Still, not looking as good as I imagined it would be (I was picturing fields of grassland gems...)

We'll know more when we get the galley out. Worst case scenario, we settle whales city earlier. Fine in my book.

And yeah, definitely going to want to set up stone city for Oxford in the intermediate future.

[WarriorKnight]

T216:

Not much domestically. We will whip KND next turn for a worker, but we are are otherwise still in the process of growing everything. Our newest cities just about have enough food to start taking off.

Elsewhere, Alhazard gets another GS and scooter gets a GE. The GS is presumably for a PP bulb, I assumed a merchant bulb was incoming but with Education out the way the next available target is PP, and a GS gets more beakers so it's better than a merchant. If they bulb PP the next GS target is Astro, which is a bit concerning since they're still able to take a tech from Liberalism. If they get Nationalism, Gunpowder and Astronomy before we can get Gunpowder I'm slightly concerned for our safety. Will have to keep an eye on him.

Dunno what scooter is going to do with his GE, since we sniped ND already I don't know what they'll go for. SM perhaps?

I think I might be getting an idea of plako's strategy. I' guess that he plans to get Oxford up super fast, using IMP to get to 6 cities quickly, PHI for double speed Uni's and the stored GE to rush Oxford. Then use the research boost to get to Rifling quickly. That wouldn't be a terrible idea, and would upgrade my opinion of his pick from 'terrible' to 'poor'. It's not the best long term strategy as everyone will get Oxford eventually, but it's certainly enough to get a tech lead in the early-middle game. He probably even has an academy already with the GS he has. Not sure how it'll work out, but since he's on the other side of the world it shouldn't matter to us much.

[WarriorKnight]

T217:



Sooner then I thought it would be... Nice work.

They took Astronomy with it, giving us another reason not to settle the SE island. We will continue to build a galley to see what's on it before deciding though.

They have now discovered 4 out of the world's 5 techs! PP and Liberalism won't do them much good for now, but the other two are pretty scary. They've done what they wanted to do pregame, now let's see how they can turn it into an advantage.

Question dave: for the next round of settlers whale city, W isthmus and mack border are locks. I've having trouble deciding on where we should put the last one though. If we assume that we don't put it on the SE island the options are either E isthmus or agro W isthmus city (or a backline city since we may not have enough units to cover all cities). Of the 2 I'm undecided atm, do you have any opinions on the matter?

[oledavy]

Question dave: for the next round of settlers whale city, W isthmus and mack border are locks. I've having trouble deciding on where we should put the last one though. If we assume that we don't put it on the SE island the options are either E isthmus or agro W isthmus city (or a backline city since we may not have enough units to cover all cities). Of the 2 I'm undecided atm, do you have any opinions on the matter?

Of the two, I think I would go west aggro city. I still would really like to get us some ICTRs though, so if we end up deferring on the southeast island, we should target our metal islands as soon as possible.

The only downside is that REM is doing well, and they might take a settlement there as an act of war. Then again, a chokepoint city down there with a couple longbows will be very hard to dislodge for a long time.

[WarriorKnight]

T218:

Let's see...

scooter's leverage of IMP Aztecs begins to pay off. They settled City 7 last turn, and City 8 this turn. In comparison mackoti has 6 cities, Al has 4 and everyone else has 5. Super glad we put our border city in place when we did, not only is it shaping up to be a great city but scooter can't really settle in our direction.

plako finished researching Nationalism, which is a bit silly IMO. How does that help him right now? He isn't SPI so Nationhood doesn't do him any good, Taj is gone and you don't research Nationalism first for Hermitage. I can only conclude either he was going for Taj and missed, or is going for Constitution first. Hard to see either being worthwhile compared to Education first as a PHI civ though.

Demogs:



Still maintaining slightly below average food/MFG numbers, but with REM in a GA it is a bit inflated. Our GNP is actually decent atm:



We have 52gpt compared to scooter's 38gpt and Al's 32gpt. We also finish a market soonish so that should boost it up as well. REM's number is inflated by the GA, but even once that's over it should still be pretty good (considering he almost has 25% world pop). Graphs confirm that mackoti is 1st in GNP though, and plako just finished a tech so he should be researching at a good clip too.

I would say REM and mackoti are in the lead atm. Scooter is 3rd, followed by plako and then Al. I'm not sure where we are on the spectrum, going by our micro so far we are probably near plako's level but we have few things going for us in the long run (circum, ND, Dikes & EI, research cap) which could bring us up to scooter.

[oledavy]

I would say REM and mackoti are in the lead atm. Scooter is 3rd, followed by plako and then Al. I'm not sure where we are on the spectrum, going by our micro so far we are probably near plako's level but we have few things going for us in the long run (circum, ND, Dikes & EI, research cap) which could bring us up to scooter.

I have to say, I'm really surprised at the lagging performance of the IMP civs compared to the SPI ones. I'm beginning to think maybe we overrated IMP compared to SPI in the pre-game. We'll see in the post game I suppose.

Al gimped himself pretty hard for his Communism beeline, I'll be curious to see if it pays off.

Logged in for a bit earlier today, and I love what you're doing as far as growing PC. I can't wait until we can get an academy in there. That being said, I'll feel better when we're back to cranking out settlers. Let's see if we can at least keep pace with the SPI civs

[WarriorKnight]

I would say REM and mackoti are in the lead atm. Scooter is 3rd, followed by plako and then Al. I'm not sure where we are on the spectrum, going by our micro so far we are probably near plako's level but we have few things going for us in the long run (circum, ND, Dikes & EI, research cap) which could bring us up to scooter.

I have to say, I'm really surprised at the lagging performance of the IMP civs compared to the SPI ones. I'm beginning to think maybe we overrated IMP compared to SPI in the pre-game. We'll see in the post game I suppose.

Eh, I argued that SPI vs IMP was a close call and I still think that's true. I'm happy with IMP though as it's a lot easier to use. The other thing to remember is that even though they may be keeping up with settler/city count, they must be giving up something to do so as ours are cheaper. I don't think many others teams are close to building a market or have the same number of units for example.

[WarriorKnight]

T119:

Nothing happened. The only thing of note is that plako turned research off revealing 38gpt, comparable to scooter. It's still not much compared to REM/mackoti/ourselves though.

With nothing else to report on, here's a look at what every city is doing atm:



Operation mega-research is well underway. We will reach size 11 in 3t, where we begin work on a settler. It will complete eot226, and is expected to settle the whale site (I am assuming that we settle the SE island in this scenario). After that we will want every cottage tile worked, which should be doable ~t235 with an exception or 2. I don't think building more settlers from here is a great idea unless we are racing for a site, units and infrastructure will work just fine as we want to grow.



This will be great once we get State Property, but for the time being it's pretty sad. It's been camping at size 4 forever building nonstop workers due to lack of food. We are working on irrigating the rice now, so we should be able to get it growing again once we finish the worker t223, but even then I think we will probably just resort to whipping workers. It does have a semi-important role of working 3 cottages for PC though.



Growing to size 6 in preparation of a settler, due eot228. After that I'm thinking we whip the library to aim for a low odds GS, failing that we grow the city to get ready to create one during the GA. Long term it can be a secondary research city with all those river tiles, with plenty of food to whip stuff.



Will build a settler eot228, although I'm trying to find a way to cut that down a turn. The crazy food surplus this city has makes it ideal to just 4 pop whip settlers constantly in the short-mid term. I'm thinking this would be a good place for NE, although it's border location makes that role a bit risky. Since it's not on the coast though it should be fine.



Not sure what to do with this city in the long term, but 2 chops and a 2 pop whip gives us a settler eot223. It will probably settle the SE island if we find good stuff there, otherwise it will go to the whale site. We should be able to get another reasonably easy settler with the final chop and a 3 pop whip, after that idk.

[WarriorKnight]

T220:

Nothing happened, again. No screenshots this turn sadly, although we do grow 4 pop at eot.

Little surprised to see that aside from scooter, no new cities have recently been planted. Maybe all the SPI civs have chopped their forests and costs are racking up? Although I do expect REM to start planting cities any turn now with his Golden Age still happening.

Neither plako nor scooter have a city above size 5, so our HR swap is starting to pay off. We should also be the first to a size 10/11 city. Our capital will allow us to afford spamming settlers again, and being IMP it is a lot easier to do so.

After the next bunch of settlers, we may have to start thinking about Courthouses in JAO/RD. Play it by ear for the moment though.