Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Singaboy]

Turn 61:

Back to the game, which is a lot better than the banter in the discussion thread.

It seems that someone (looking at the score, I think Russia) has conquered a city state. Sulla is tracking the score a lot closer than I and would know better. Shangdu has not grown to pop 5 and instead needs 2 turns to grow to pop 5. This is the Civ 6 UI for you.



I move some units including the missionary that will charge Venezia next turn. The northern builder moves onto the hill to improve the salt next turn. I also rearrange the horseman and one archer for the attack next turn. Time for China to add a city state.

I then proceed to chop the forest into the builder at Hangzhou and pull the overflow into the temple. Production at Hangzhou drops to 14 hammers for this turn but with growth to pop 8, a border expansion and mining of the hill, it will go up to 17 hammers next turn. That might in fact be enough to finish the temple in tow turns.

I then play around with micromanagement, assigning the 3 food cow to Hangzhou which lets it still grow next turn to pop 8 while Shangdu works the sugar for a turn to grow next turn to pop 5 too. Production drops for a turn but that will be compensated by immediate growth. Next turn, with salt connected, the amenity situation in all cities will improve too, Beijing will be ecstatic until it grows a further pop to 3.



Income increases a little with the salt worked and hopefully will grow with Venezia being converted next turn. Of course, culture will drop with the loss of 2 culture when attacking Antananarivo.
The new builder from Hangzhou starts to make its way to Beijing and will be ready to chop the rain forest in 5 turns. I will make sure that micromanagement gets the builder as close as possible to finishing before chopping the forest that will house the Colosseum. Currently the builder has a mere 18 hammers invested in it, now making 5.3 *1.3 = 6.9 hammers a turn. This means being slightly above 82 hammers by the time we chop the rainforest. I need to think of something to divert production into for a while, maybe a monument? I don't want to invest in walls or settler without the production multipliers though walls might be a good idea too.

I am also happy to see my military strength at 103 and Rome's at almost 200. We have made up some ground here and I will continue to produce some horsemen to explore the SW and be ready for any attack.

[Sullla]

Wow, a busy day with a new patch for Civ6 to go along with the expansion releasing tomorrow. I have some thoughts about the patch notes, but first let me get through my turn report before it gets around to Singaboy.



First of all, the city state that was defeated was the Religious one that Nubia/England were attacking. We knew it was a Religious city state because both of their faith/turn dropped a few turns ago, which could only have come from attacking the city state where they both had envoys. It turns out that this was Kandy and it was taken by Nubia. It came with a Holy Site district and a shrine intact so perhaps they will slowly start making the climb towards their own religion. Woden and Chevalier Mal Fet both have 4 cities now and will soon pass the Khmer/Kongo team for third place. It was a good turn for them.

In barbarian news, I shot at the damaged barb warrior and redlined it with my archer, while fortifying on the hill tile to heal a little bit with my warrior. I'm hoping that the barbarian on the right will move first and attack my archer, leaving the other barb warrior to suicide against my own fortified warrior. If they both attack the archer, my unit still shouldn't die although it might have to run away to heal. Too bad this particular warrior still doesn't have the +7 strength Battlecry promotion yet.



Further south, I'm getting a better view of the land down here. It looks like the Kongo/Khmer continent is located down here offset to the east of our continent a bit, connected by that snaky/lake-filled isthmus that my warrior has been exploring. Based on what we've seen thus far, there's a good chance that England/Nubia are further off to the east beyond Kongo/Khmer, and the landbridge to the west of Singaboy connects to either Germany or Russia. I suspect we'll find one of their teams if we keep exploring in that direction. The water in the middle appears to be a large sea enclosed on all sides by land, with resource-filled islands in the middle. My galleys will keep scoping them out, and there's a good chance I'll plant some cities on those islands down the road.

Unfortunately it also looks like I might have to capture The Jungle Book to have any realistic chance of attacking Seoul. We'll see though, still a lot of exploring to be done.



In the northwest, I declared war on Antananarivo and shot both of the city state warriors in the field, one for 39 damage and the other for 49 damage as shown. I'm not sure this was the best tactical positioning of my two units here, as I would have liked to have both of my archers shoot the warrior on the hill. I couldn't remember if I could shoot over the forest tile from the tile southwest of the sugar resource. Anyway, my western archer will likely get attacked between turns, but that unit almost has enough XP to promote again and heal in the process so it's all good. Singaboy, you might try leaving one of the tiles next to the city state open and see if the warrior inside will come out to attack. That's sheer idiocy but Buenos Aires did it against me and it would help speed things up. I think we'll need about 3 turns total to do this, with the horseman able to delivering the finishing blow. Antananarivo does have a granary and monument inside, so Singaboy will get the 2 culture/turn back once he takes the city (and repairs the monument).

Domestically, Defensive Warfare finally finished researching, opening up a civics swap:



Limes is in, Maritime Industries is out. I had thought about this and both Urban Planning and Ilkum remained in place for the moment. This is all setting up for another policy swap in a few turns that I'll detail in a minute.



Here's a view of the southern cities, with Venezia's new galley heading out to explore. It already found two sources of whales this turn, my favorite seafood resource. (Completing the second galley also unlocked the boost for Shipbuilding as expected.) Venezia has a fair bit of overflow from the galley that finished, and although it would be more ideal in a perfect world to put that into something other than the city walls (which get the +100% production bonus anyway), the build timings line up a lot better to construct the walls now. I want city walls in Venezia both because it's inherently an exposed city sitting there on the water, and also to set up a forest chop into some kind of district using one of the builders currently in these city queues. Note that Ostia and Milano are almost done their builders, still making use of Ilkum policy. I'll take both of them to 1 turn away from completion, then finish them when Serfdom policy is ready. Ostia and Milano will start building their own city walls in 1 and 2 turns respectively.

So in two turns, I'll have builders 1 turn away from completion in Roma, Ostia, and Milano. (I'm aware that the cost will scale up as each one finishes but bear with me here.) That will allow me to use my Mysticism civics swap to replace Ilkum with Colonization policy and start building some settlers. My current thinking is to produce three settlers in a new wave: one from Roma, one from Venezia, and one from Firenze. That will take the latter two cities a little while to complete, especially when the cost scales up, but there's nothing else critical that these cities need to work on right now and I want to minimize the time spent in Colonization policy. Roma won't take too long to finish its settler and can train some more builders and military units to protect these new settlements. I also have 15 builder charges coming out along with the settlers to improve some of their new tiles. Hopefully I can be at 8 cities by Turn 80 even without conquering the Seoul city state.



Inside Ostia. A builder added another wheat farm, the fourth one needed for the Feudalism boost, and the city is getting a sweet +7.7 food/turn surplus right now. Only three more turns to reach size 4. It's going to take 6 turns to research Feudalism with the boost, plus I have to kill 1 turn on Mysticism for the policy swap, which means that the rice tile will arrive inside this city's borders only just slightly late. There will be a builder on that tile ready to farm it on the turn borders expand. (Maybe growing to size 4 will shave that down to 7 turns remaining but I doubt it.)

By the way, note the confirmation that population points are still producing 0.7 beakers per population point, not 0.5 beakers as the patch notes suggested. You do sometimes wonder how a mistake like this happens given that it should be a simply one number replacement in the programming. Anyway, with the patch dropping today I went ahead and did this:



Dropping an envoy into Seoul for the +2 beakers bonus. Why do that after going through the big rationale last turn about saving all envoys for Lisbon? Well, two reasons. The first is that it doesn't look like this will be an immediate city conquest, not with it apparently located within the core territory of Kongo. The longer it takes for us to capture that city, the more useful it will be to have an envoy inside. The other reason is that I'm anticipating that Firaxis will correct their mistake and change the science from population to 0.5 beakers. That change will make science from districts (and the Seoul city state envoy) relatively more valuable. Better to take advantage of that extra science immediately if Rome is going to do it at all, and I felt that the new map info plus the patch change shifted the calculation of value to make it worthwhile now. As usual, I've written a wall of text and ended up changing my mind twice.



In the northeast, Roma swapped off its almost-completed builder to city walls. This is another chopping play: Roma builds the walls for two turns, then chops for 100 production into its Commercial district. It will only take 2 turns of production to complete after that, and I already have the worker in position to do the forest chop. Mining the hill under that forest will also trigger the boost for Apprenticeship tech so we'll pulling double duty here. So overall Roma goes walls (2 turns), Commercial district (2 turns), then settler (6 turns I think?) and then finishes the builder post-Feudalism. Things are lining up here pretty nicely.

Firenze finishes its Campus district next turn and will start a settler of its own, although that one will take a while to finish even with Colonization running. It's OK though, this city doesn't have any forests in range to chop for Limes abuse anyway. The city grabbed the useless natural wonder tile and will indeed pick the really awesome grassland hill tile next, with the borders expanding again right when the city grows to size 5.

The only major score change was Woden capturing the Religious city state. More to come later tonight about the new patch.

[Sullla]

OK, let's talk about the new patch that released day. Here are the full notes for anyone who hasn't seen them:

Base Game Patch Notes

ENHANCEMENTS
Rework start position algorithm to spread major powers evenly across the map first and then insert city-states in the margins. Results in improved distances between Civilizations and better quality for major civ start positions.
Add notification about production salvaged from a Wonder. Make sure that production is credited.

BALANCE CHANGES
Diplomatic actions now scale with game speed.
Government Policies that increase production on Melee class units now include Anti-Cavalry class units.
Change tech boost for Steel to add a soft prerequisite that hints you probably want Ironclads before Destroyers.
Barbarian difficulty has been updated to scale with each difficulty level. (Warlord, Prince, King etc...)
Healing plunder reward from Farms reduced from 100 to 50.
‘Sack’ government policy has been removed and its effects have been added to the ‘Raid’ policy.
Naval combat changes – Bombard land units are now more effective against naval units, Ranged land units are less effective against naval units.
Pillage rewards are now displayed in the tooltip of the Pillage action button.
Boost number of random Apostle Promotions from 2 to 3.
Reduce Science per population from 0.7 down to 0.5.
Great Admirals and Great Generals have a combat bonus and a movement bonus, they no longer stack.
Gold and Faith rewards from Tribal Villages now scale with Game Speed.

GENERAL BUG FIXES
Apostles could run out of random promotions to choose from.
If a spy is traveling to a city that changes hands, abort travel and return them to your capital.
Warrior Monks now benefit from Great Generals and can earn the Spear of Fionn promotion.
Abundant resource will spawn sea luxuries.
Units levied from a city-state will now retain any promotions earned while controlled by a player.
Fixed several issues with obsolete units appearing in the production menu for a city.
Fortified units will now properly ‘wake up’ after being attacked.
Fortified or Sleeping units that have been expelled from a city will now properly ‘wake up’.
Support units can now be levied from City-States.
Fixed a bug preventing Ranged Cavalry class units from receiving the combat bonus from the Spear of Fionn ability.
Fixed an issue with embarked units not being able to heal in friendly territory.
Properly abort all spy missions if a city changes hands.
Fixed an issue that caused zone of control UI to show between religious units of the same player.
Properly update siege status of a city when units die, are deleted, etc.
Don’t award a Spread Religion charge to Gurus from the Mosque.
Make sure losing Kandy as an ally doesn’t interfere with the Reliquaries belief.

AI
Fixed an issue that was causing the AI to send multiple spies on the same mission.
AI will look at graphic change on spaceports, and can target their spies to spaceports that are performing their science victory projects.
Improved opportunity cost considerations for district placement.
Improve ability to place / use aqueducts.
AI knows to move builders back into their territory if they get caught outside.
AI will not complain about stealth units it can’t see being too close to its border.
AI is much less likely to trade its cities away as part of a peace deal.
Improved resource trading, AI considers luxury resources it is currently importing.
Improved new city placement, also fixed issues where the settler would try to travel through hostile territory to get an escort.
AI prefers garrisoning ranged units over melee.
If the AI can capture, or significantly damage, a target city, it may ignore hostile units nearby to do that.
Fixed coordinating ranged attacks.

MULTIPLAYER
Changing default Resources option to Standard for multiplayer. There is a map generation issue where setting Resources to Abundant and StartPosition to Balanced results in civ starting positions being too close together.
Players could not ready up when dirty from another match.
Improved stability when players connect to or disconnect from launching games.
Pausing the game could desync multiplayer games.
Missing official content icon was not working in the multiplayer lobby.
Improved stability when game host leaves game in multiplayer.
Made sure you can’t declare war on a Teammate.

CIV-SPECIFIC BUG FIXES
Properly credit Kongo with 1 Culture, 1 Tourism if multiple works from the same artist are in the Palace.
Don’t give the Hansa bonuses for adjacent Antiquity Sites/Shipwrecks.
Allow India to train Warrior Monks if 1 follower of that religion is in the city.
Fix Arabia’s unique ability so only FOREIGN cities following their religion that add Science.
If the Kongo captures a city-state, don’t let them grab a Holy Site.

USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS
Show turns until Anarchy clears.
Show turns until Friendship lapses.
Defeated notification indicates whether a city-state or full civ was eliminated.
Remove warmonger information on the Keep City dialog if city received in a trade.
Only allow religious units to Rest/Repair on tiles where they are close enough to a Holy Site to actually heal.
Do not hide Casus Belli sub-menu if a denouncement has not occurred (so the reason that war can't be declared is clearer to the player).
Show turns until Denouncement clears.
Correct timing of Culture Victory imminent message.
Add notification if an enemy spy escaped your police.
Emphasized several notifications indicating negative effects on the player.
Civilopedia bug fixes and improvements.
Trade Route panel bug fixes and improvements.
Corrected an Issue where incorrect team numbers were displayed.
Add whether or not an original capital was conquered or not to the associated gossip message.
Show requirements for each Casus Belli when that option is grayed out.
Fixed map pin corruption when deleting and adding map pins.
Version mismatched games are colored differently in multiplayer lobby.
If multiple players are affected by a nuclear attack, the Declare War warning dialog will now appropriately list all players involved.
Always show the player’s own cities first in the list of trade route destinations.

ART
New Barbarian Scout skin.
Animation fix for Gorgo.

WRITING
Various text updates and bug fixes.

I'm going to go through and pull out the changes that seem relevant for our game here, starting with this one:

Reduce Science per population from 0.7 down to 0.5.

This one is probably the single biggest change, although as you saw in my turn report, it currently isn't working. Population points are still worth 0.7 beakers right now; I'm thinking that Firaxis will hotfix this since it's such an obvious screwup. Anyway, the main effect here is to lower the effectiveness of pure population for generating science and increase the importance of Campus districts and their buildings. It also means that the whole game will play slightly slower since the tech costs don't appear to have been reduced to match the decrease in beakers. This will make it harder for teams to ignore Campuses and keep their science up through city spamming and population growth. I think this generally favors our team and the Germany/Russia team, as Rome is about to finish its third Campus district while Germany has 3 Campuses of its own. Elsewhere, Kongo has 1 Campus and all the other teams have zero. If anything, libraries should be given slightly more priority in build queues since a library now equals 4 population instead of 3 population. Not much else to say, we'll work around it when (if?) it gets implemented.

Government Policies that increase production on Melee class units now include Anti-Cavalry class units

This is big too, spears/pikes can finally get out of their current useless role. It made no sense why they were so crippled previously. I doubt it will be too useful in this game though.

Naval combat changes – Bombard land units are now more effective against naval units, Ranged land units are less effective against naval units.

This is probably a bad change as it will make naval units even more unstoppable than they already are. Losing control of the seas is not an option.

Boost number of random Apostle Promotions from 2 to 3.

A good change for us since Singaboy will have enough faith to potentially purchase apostles. When we build the Mahabodi, it will be worth checking to see what promotions each apostle gets before using them to enhance our religion. I believe that if you get the Orator promotion (2 extra charges), you can spread religion twice and still enhance your religion. It takes 3 charges for an apostle to enhance the faith. The odds of one of the two apostles having Orator promotion is 1 - (2/3 * 2/3) = 5/9 or 55 percent, not that bad!

Great Admirals and Great Generals have a combat bonus and a movement bonus, they no longer stack.

And this is the change most significant for our game. This patch change absolutely devastates the England/Nubia team. Their whole gameplan is based around getting Great Generals for Nubia and Great Admirals for England. Now that the two of them don't stack, they can get, at most, +5 strength and +1 movement on their units. And that's not all that scary. I mentioned before that I wasn't concerned about Nubia getting the first Great General, I was only worried about Nubia getting the first TWO Great Generals and stacking them together. No fears of that now. This removes almost all of the pressure to get out Encampments/Harbors to counter their strategy. I really can't overstate how important this is; their entire strategy has been eviscerated by this patch change. Too bad for them.

The other big changes all seem to be confined to the expansion and I'm happy with that. Overall, the effect on our game should be pretty minimal outside of crushing the England/Nubia strategy. Given how many bad things could have been in this patch to hurt our team, it's a great result for us.

[Singaboy]

Rome is developing awesomely

I think your western archer is in no trouble. In fact , once the warrior has attacked, you should be able to kill the unit next turn and that should gain you another promotion. I will use both archers to kill that warrior blocking the city and then attack the city itself with my horseman. The horseman should cause some good damage, even if the city can regain 20 health. The horseman also wants to earn a promotion from this battle, the more attacks the merrier here. The moves will leave a tile open for Antananarivo to expose its warrior, if the city state is that dumb.

Good move to invest an envoy for 2 science a turn. If they patch the science rate, it would mean a more urgent campus finish for Hangzhou after all.

By the way, Sulla, do you know the formula for the jungle chop? I want to get as close as possible to 82 hammers with the chop so that the subsequent forest chop will yield a maximum hammers into the entertainment district. That brings up another point. Currently, the costs for my districts are governed by the technologies I have completed. I have a civic less than technologies. Hence, finishing defensive tactics will not increase the district costs. However, any technology would. What I will do is to hold of any further technology until the entertainment district has been locked. I will then try and finish as many technologies as possible to increase the forest chop yield. Currently, I have sailing one turn away from completion, so that will be inserted after the entertainment lock. I might have to switch to other technologies to attempt to finish another one in time for that forest chop.

[Sullla]

One Last Thing ™: This is my best guess about what the world looks like:



Something like this would make a lot of sense given what we've seen thus far. It would also be quite nice having England/Nubia as the furthest team away from us.

[Singaboy]

That guess looks pretty much feasible. Singaboy next to Archduke is a reoccurring theme here, so why not.

By the way, when you liberate a city state, you will get 3 envoys in it with nobody else having any. Liberating Kandy might be a good idea for China

[Singaboy]

Two additions regarding the patch

If an Apostle gains the Pilgrim promotion, it could move toward Firenze, gain 3 extra charges via the Natural Wonder, then convert Lisbon and Firenze and then be used to evangelize a belief. I think I would like to sue one of the Apostles to gain Wats immediately in order to get that belief no matter what others do. If population only contributes 0.5 science in future, wats will be more important.

I read on a German civ site, that someone playing China had no longer any effects from GG and GA and more worryingly, could not use the builder to charge a wonder. I might be able to verify this with the Oracle, just to test this out.

[Singaboy]

Turn 62:

The great news first. I tested to charge a wonder with a builder and it worked like a charm. There is no issue at all. With that, back to the game. Hangzhou and Shangdu both grew a pop and both are hitting the housing caps. Shangdu might actually need a granary to grow long term.
Science inched up a little while culture dropped to 10 per turn thanks to the war with Antananarivo. Well, my calculations were wrong and Hangzhou is in no position to gain the temple next turn. In fact, the city is 22 hammers shy of 120. The builder there mines the hill and after rearranging the citizens, the city makes more than 17 hammers a turn while working the sugar and citrus.
Given that a policy change to Corvee will take 4 turns, I can't start charging the wonder before T66 anyway. The builder at Shangdu won't reach the wonder until charging at T68 finishing the wonder as stated on T70.




At Shangdu, the builder mines the salt and we get the Eureka for apprenticeship. The second builder at Hangzhou, that is on the way to Beijing, moves on top of a jungle. This is nice as I can check the hammers a chop will produce at Beijing four turns later. For that purpose, I switch research to Engineering in order to avoid overflow of the mathematics research and to keep the district costs in check.



With a new citizen assignment, Shangdu is making 12.6 hammers a turn with still means 12 turns until the commercial hub is done. Might want to use the next builder from Hangzhou to chop the 2/2 forest hill there to speed this up. With three luxuries in our possession, three cities are happy and Beijing is at +3 amenities, completely ecstatic.

I use the missionary for a last charge to convert Venezia. Rome now has 3/5 cities following Marco Polo. I am not sure what this exactly means for Rome, but surely, it should be able to use Crusade later on. Income for China is at 31.9 gpt. Buying the forest tile at Shangdu for a chop later on won't be an issue too. I would prefer to keep some gold in the coffers for some emergency situation. In this respect, as stated earlier, I think it is a good idea to leave Rome's two archers in the west to cover that part of our land. Of course, first we need to take Antananarivo. I need two archer shots to take out that wounded warrior thanks to my archers having no promotions yet. The last attack is done by the horseman and we reduce city health to 152/200, which will recover to 172/200.
If the warrior from Antananarivo stays within the city, we should be able to attack with three archers and the horseman, possibly taking off 100 health. that could in fact mean that China can take the city on T64. However, T65 might be a more realistic target, especially if the city can produce more units. On T65 we will have a second horseman that could theoretically attack the city immediately. Surely that should be enough.

[Modo]

Quick question about patching in this kind of MP game, wouldn't it be better to freeze / lock such a game until it finishes and not apply any new patches / expansions in the meantime?
I mean Firaxis is not Paradox and this situation comes up rarely enough to at least ensure that one's strategy (not Nubia/England like in this case, anyone can be impacted) is not affected by the changes?

[Sullla]

Catching up on a few issues since yesterday's turn:

* The formula for the jungle chop? I don't have the exact numbers in front of me here on my phone, I can post them later today in 12 hours or so from this post. One thing I do know is that a forest chop produces all production, a jungle chop is 50/50 for food and production, and a marsh clear is all food. It's also the case that a forest/jungle/marsh chop has a base value of 20 while a resource harvest has a base value of 25, so the chopping is always worth 80% of what the resource harvest is worth. Right now I'm guessing that you would get about 30 food and 30 production from a jungle chopping, although that's just an estimate. I can give you the exact number later.

The scaling formula for district cost and chopping/harvesting is based on the greater of (techs discovered / 67) or (civics discovered / 50). In most cases, this ends up being the number of civics discovered since it requires significantly more techs discovered than civics discovered for the tech component to be the one determining the scaling cost. I can check this as well later today, unfortunately I don't have my Excel spreadsheet for PBEM7 with me right now. I think it's pretty close right now for China as far as which of the two is determinining the scaling cost.

* Liberating the Kandy city state would indeed be great for China. But if we're in a position to do that, given how far away Nubia is located, we've probably already won this game.

* On apostle promotions: that's a great point about Pilgrim being an option, I forgot about that. We have really good odds to get either Orator or Pilgrim on at least one of the two apostles; I did the math real quick because I was curious, and the odds of either of the two showing up on an apostle with three promotion options is 58%. That's only for one apostle though, so we have 87% odds of having Pilgrim or Orator on at least one of the two. Should be pretty likely. By the way, I concur about grabbing Wats right away with one of the apostles. No reason to take chances and the (forcoming?) change to 0.5 beakers per population point only makes Wats that much better. Most likely, one of the two apostles with have Pilgrim/Orator as an option, and we'll use the one that doesn't have those promotions available to take Wats immediately. Crusade can wait for a few turns because no one is stealing that belief from us. Literally no one, it's not possible: Russia/Germany is the only other team with any kind of faith output and they already have Defender of the Faith in that category. Khmer is getting something like 3 faith/turn right now and apostles cost about 200 faith to purchase. We're safe there.

* China city micro: Hangzhou and Shangdu will both need granaries eventually now that they're at the housing cap. Finding time to build them could be tricky though. As far as the temple in the capital, you weren't that far off on the temple. It needed 22 production and the city gets 17 production, that's not too bad. Done in 2 turns with a lot of overflow into the next build. I'll be interested to see the exact cost of a Wat once it's available; I think it's 380 faith to purchase. That's likely our next faith purchase and should be ready in about a dozen turns.

* One note about research: why Engineering tech? Wouldn't it be more useful to push towards Apprenticeship instead? I'm thinking that the +1 production bonus on mines would be useful to have. Or is there another reason I'm missing?

* I am not sure that Rome will be able to use Crusade but I certainly hope so. We'll find out in practice soon enough. It's good to have Rome as a civ converted to our religion now, and that Chinese income of 32 gold/turn - with zero Commercial districts completed as yet - is simply amazing.

* I think we have decent odds to take the cultural city state on Turn 64. The key is that city strength drops quickly as it takes damage, and we'll have a lot of shots pouring into Antananarivo. I think we'll be able to get three archer shots on Turn 63, and then four archer shots on Turn 64, plus a melee attack from the horseman on each of those turns. If I'm wrong, then we'll simply take the place on Turn 65 as you stated. One turn earlier would be nice though.

* Finally, Modo it's not practical for a game like this to avoid patching. While there are some workarounds with Steam to avoid installing patches, that would mean that none of the eight players in this game could take part in any other PBEM games since we'd be on a version different from what everyone else was using, and that's not realistic. Working around patches is just part of the risk of playing games that are still relatively new.