[SPOILERS] naufragar is in for a penny

[naufragar]

I have no clue how to dotmap. I may well end up stranding the plains that BGN's scout is on as well as the two south of it. My silver is in an awkward place.



(Compare Mackoti's. Also noticeable is his second city.)



I need to see if I can spare a unit to scout west of that silver. Right now, all I see are peaks and desert hills around it, but there could be food.  

[naufragar]

I'm not allowed to complain about die rolls for the rest of the game.



RICK LIVES!
The hill he's on would make for a nuts city. I've yet to see that much food in one place on this map. Yellow player and Mackoti might have a lot to talk about.

My pathetic third city gets founded next turn. Three deserts. Three desert hills in the BFC. I guess it's not too late to change my mind. Look at how awful this is going to be:



(The warrior is where he is because that forested deer was in fog, and the last thing I needed was a wolf to be hiding there and to eat my workers.)

[naufragar]

Would you look at this hell hole?




(I'm very sad I had to abbreviate Fort Survivalist.) I thought about founding on the copper, but I want to work that tile and it would take forever to get the corn. This map is very plains-heavy, and I might have to adjust my internal metric for good/bad land. (Even so, that many deserts will make this city garbage in the mid-game.)

I'm all out of micro plans. Luckily, cities are on placeholder builds. Something for the weekend.

BGN and Mackoti are still dumping all their EP into me. My plan right now is to get Mack's graphs and then switch to an even split between those two. I don't know where BGN is, but he knows where I am. I would prefer not to fight a war with the Aggressive Charismatic guy just yet. (Who also has a size 5 cap.)

I don't know what binary research is and have never done it, but you can see me attempting it in this game. I get the theory behind running 0% before the libraries are finished. I think I'm saving like a beaker by doing this, and I should have AH done before my next settler. I'm going AH before Pottery because I kinda want to see horses before I do my next settling wave. Perhaps this is a mistake.

[naufragar]

Hello kindly lurkers. I'm unable to connect to the game today.   I'm going to try in about an hour to reconnect, but who knows if that'll work. If the turn looks like it's going to roll, would you mind playing out these moves?

1) The scout & 2 northern warriors can be stationary.
2) Could you move the southern warrior 1SE? (so he ends up on that middle desert hill? Unless, obviously, there's a sudden barb threat at Fort Superiority.)
3) Could you make sure the cap, Thorny Vineyard, is working the sheep and ivory? (Warrior should complete next turn, then.)
4) Could you move the southern worker pair to the corn and start farming? Could you keep pasturing with the northern worker? (And if you don't mind, could you halt the workers' activity once they've done it? This can be done by alt-clicking on the halt button.)
5) Thank you very very much!

You'll see if you log in that I changed research to Pottery without reporting it. Basically, if I strand horses with my idiotic dotmapping, on my own head be it, but I was expanding a little too fast to not have a cottage or two, I think.

Thanks very much again!

Edit: Able to play. All's well.

[naufragar]

Been too busy to play well or report well. We're out of the just move your worker to your food phase of the game, and my plans have gone to crap. Found out who yellow player is.



It's Aretas. You can see the blue glow around his archer. He has a barracks. The diplo menu tells me he's still on one city. I'll be annoyed if he pops the scout, but it's a thing he can do.

I had a bit of an eyebrow raising moment when I was using the diplo menu to check for cities. Rusten is on three! I was a little skeptical that the grow to size 5 plus get a religion would be a workable plan, but man has he played his opening beautifully. Well done.

I'm still keeping my EP on BGN and Mackoti. Mack's got 22 into me and BGN has 30, I think. I'm making a note, so I know how much they're putting into me to see if I can back off. I'd rather get Aretas' graphs than BGN's, but I'm much closer to grabbing the latter's.

I've been doing a meager little Opponent Analysis when I meet people, so here's my take on Aretas. Ragnar is very good. Financial isn't nerfed by an abundance of rivers, and Agg works with it like a mini Org (plus all the other nice things Agg does). I think going Archery first was a little anti-synergistic, since archers don't get the Agg bonus, but he's going to be safe for a while with archers promoted in a cheap barracks. The HRE is good. Since you'll be building courthouses anyway, why not make them great? I have no opinion on landsknechts. Don't think I've ever built one, in fact. I guess they're a way to hedge your bets by not building macemen? Idk. I'd hear out other opinions. My style of play is to expand as fast as possible with little tiny cities. This isn't necessarily the optimal way, just how I play. (Rusten has obviously shown getting a bigger city, especially working Imp mines(?), can be just as if not more viable.) All that to say, I'm not sure I would have played the opening Aretas has. He's not in slavery (shown in the foreign relations screen) and is still on his first city. Still, like with Rusten, I can misjudge "tall" openings.

[naufragar]

Aretas didn't kill my scout! Thank you Aretas! Rick continued along and will heal up his last hit point two turns from now. In other good news, would you look at this sexy, sexy crop yield?



(Of course, pretty much every time I whip, I whip off an improved food tile, so that number won't last.)

I'm a little nervous about the soldiers count. Are people getting metal units out? I had wanted to get a granary or two finished before I did. Did people really hook their copper that fast? Hopefully those numbers don't reflect an increasingly militarized world. If a couple enemy units show up at my borders, I have the copper and the pop (and the roads) to get real defenses in place, but I would obviously prefer if we could all sing kumbaya for a little bit longer.

BGN is dumping his complement of EP into me. I think Mack is only putting in 2 per turn, so I might cut my EP spending on him back to 1pt next turn. Aretas put 2 points into me, so I might be force to cut back on BGN and hope he pulls his EP off once he gets my graphs.

Did I comment on BGN's scout before? It went south of me then back up and found Mack. I was wondering what made him turn around.



My fog-gazing intern tells me with some degree of confidence that the tile 3S of the warrior is water, so either the land forms a narrow choke, or this is the end of a continent and my backline until serious navies. If it's my backline... Man, I will learn to love this desert if it's my desert. 

(As far as I understand barb spawning rules, my warrior should be able to get back to Fort Survivalist before any barb spawns. Unfortunately, I'm working from memory, so it's all a little shoot from the hip. Nerve wracking, but it would otherwise be a long time before I figure out what's down here.)

I have to say I love civ. I'm sad when I don't have time to do a good job, and I haven't had time to plan effectively recently, but the game itself is tons of fun. In the next 12ish turns I've got a couple of settlers coming on line and I'll have to pick a direction for the empire to expand into. In that time frame, I'll finish pottery and animal husbandry and start having real tech choices. While I haven't scouted my neighbors very thoroughly, the geopolitical scene is interesting, and I'll have to figure out how I can settle up north towards Aretas in the absence of visible food (minus a plains hill sheep). Civ4's great.

[Coeurva]

The rule is simple: barbs cannot spawn within two tiles of any unit you control (i.e. a 5x5 square with the unit in the centre), but extant barbs can certainly enter this zone. Vision doesn't matter. EDIT: To clarify -- just as RefSteel said, I meant that vision doesn't matter inside that square

I don't know if it's the same on water, incidentally.

[naufragar]

Vision doesn't matter.

Really?! Hmm. I had thought that barbs couldn't spawn adjacent to borders. No idea why I thought this, but I had been acting as if it were gospel.

Thanks for the info.

[RefSteel]

I had thought that barbs couldn't spawn adjacent to borders. No idea why I thought this, but I had been acting as if it were gospel.

This is actually correct; barbs also can't spawn on any tile on which you have vision - so for instance, a Sentry Chariot on a hill surrounded by endless flatland keeps a 7x7 square "safe," and barbs never spawn within sight of your borders. I think Coeurva's point was that barbs can't spawn within two tiles of another unit (including other barb units) even when you don't have vision on the tiles in question - that is, "vision doesn't matter" in the sense that for that purpose, vision isn't required.

[naufragar]

Ah, thanks.

I think that means what with the worker and the warrior, no barb should be able to spawn and race the warrior to the city. I think......