Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[roland of gilead]

Where are we on wonders?

No longer worthwhile?

There were plans for colossus and great lighthouse.

[Sullla]

Since we keep discussing Darwin, let me walk through my understanding of how the mechanic works. Darwin provides 500 science for each tile of a natural wonder next to the Great Scientist when he's triggered. In the case of the Pantanal, that would be four separate 500 beaker charges. Let's say that we're researching Industrialization (845 beakers) into Steam Power (970 beakers) as planned. Darwin gets activated and the first 500 beakers are dropped into Industrialization. Then the second 500 beakers are used, the tech is discovered, and we end up with 155 beakers of overflow. If Steam Power is queued up, those 155 beakers of overflow go into Steam Power. Then when the third 500 beaker charge gets used, the 155 beakers of the previous overflow are ERASED, because Civ6 can only handle one tech's worth of overflow at a time. As I understand it, the way to stop this is to avoid queueing up multiple techs on the tree. This does limit your civ to only discovering one technology at a time, but it prevents tech overflow from being wasted in the fashion listed above. While the beakers lost aren't too bad in the scenario above, you can easily have a situation where you're research a tech that cost 600 beakers, and then you lose 400 out of 500 beakers when the game tries to process multiple kinds of beaker overflow at once.

The tricky thing for our team is that I want to get a few caravels built before leaping forward to Steam Power and ironclads. Once we trigger the Great Scientist, Steam Power research will complete and the caravels will be obsoleted. However, I also can't start building caravels until I unlock Exploration civic, since that holds the policy card for +100% production on Renaissance/Industrial naval units (Press Gangs)... and it also obsoletes Maritime Industries. So I need to line things up such that I finish building all my desired quadriremes for frigate upgrades, then complete Exploration civic and swap over to Press Gangs for a few turns to build some caravels (I have 5 now and I'd like 2-3 more), and then after they complete we burn Darwin to leap forward through Industrialization and Steam Power in one go. I should be able to do all of that in the next 10-12 turns, or at least that's the current plan.

Roland, Singaboy is planning to chop out the Great Lighthouse at one of his newer cities. We may or may not build the Colossus, there are a lot of other priorities right now. Thanks for bringing it up though.

Having Fridays off of work means that you get an early turn today:



There's a good chance that we'll get two turns in today, since the game can move faster with only six players. In any case, EmperorK also rejected my deal for spices, heh. No one wants the spices! Or more accurately no one wants to trade with Rome right now, and for good reason. One thing that I noted here is that my knights aren't seeing a ton of units along the Nubian border, and Woden's power has been flat for the last few turns. He's finished three settlers and that suggests he wants to go into domestic building for a while. That's a good sign for us - we'd love to keep England/Nubia locked into peace for the next 25-30 turns to let us turn and deal with Russia/Germany. They might be OK with that too, letting the other two teams beat their brains out for a while. I think that's the best we can hope for right now, that we'll face only one opponent at a time. The more likely scenario is that both of the other teams work together against us, and avoiding that with Declaration of Friendships is our top strategic goal. Thank goodness it's an AI Diplomacy game so we don't have to deal with the kind of nonsense from PBEM4.

Singaboy's knight is doing some excellent scouting for us right now. I'm most interested to find out if England has canal cities set up on the isthmus near Jutland; I suspect that they do. If at all possible, it would be fantastic to figure that out.



I had two trade routes to assign this turn and I decided to take pictures of both. I looked over the list of destinations for Parma's trader and ultimately decided on Pagan. This was the highest gold/turn result that I could get from this city, and it will build some additional roads in the jungles over by Pagan when the trader gets over there in two dozen or so turns. We'll also get a little bit more passive religious spread in Parma as a result, not bad. The Roman unique ability added 3 gold/turn to this trade route and made a big difference. I love that I'm able to get this much money from one of Singaboy's cities.



Napoli had a lot of interesting choices as well. I could have gone to Lisbon for 10 gold/turn, but I opted for Beijing instead for 9 gold/turn and the one point of food displayed. Hangzhou was also a compelling choice at 8 gold/turn along with 1 beaker and 1 culture; I ultimately decided on Beijing because it would build another road connection through the jungles in the area between Milano and Beijing. Again, it will take ages for the trader to get up there but having more internal roads can only be a good thing. Once again, the Roman unique ability increased the gold value of this trade route by 50%. Although we don't talk much about the "All Roads Lead to Rome" aspect of this civ, it can be handy at times like this.

At some point I'm going to need to run a road from Napoli up to Nan Madol to get a connection between this city and Parma. We can't afford to have no road connection between the two cities in the event of future fighting with England/Nubia. The trade route yield to Nan Madol was only 6 gold/turn though, and I passed for the moment. We do have more than 20 turns of guaranteed peace remaining with Woden and it's not an urgent need right now.



With Mercantilism civic finishing between turns, I was able to swap policies. The only one that changed was dropping Colonization for the new Triangular Trade. I'm looking forward to replacing Natural Philosophy with the far superior Rationalism at the next civics swap, as well as changing out Maritime Industries for Press Gangs in the near future. Probably 5 more turns for the pair of them.



With 8 trade routes active and Triangular Trade now in place, Rome's income instantly exploded. 112 gold/turn, woohoo! I really might be able to get through the next round of unit upgrades without having to beg money off of Singaboy for once. I also wanted to highlight the improved yields from building a camp now that Mercantilism civic has been discovered. Camps are the worst tile improvement in the early game: 1 gold, no food, no production. You should ignore building camps with precious builder charges unless you have no other alternative. (I've said before that camps should be changed to add +1 food, not +1 gold, and then Mercantilism should add +1 production and +1 gold. This would make camps at least situationally worth building.) Once you do finally reach Mercantilism in the midgame, however, camps suddenly become an excellent tile improvement. These truffles jumped up to 3 food / 2 production / 4 gold yield, very nice indeed. And yes, these are THE TRUFFLES, which will finally be going over to Singaboy. I offered them in a trade deal on my turn.



Here's our overview screenshot. The double Campus district projects will finish next turn and there's been no movement from TheArchduke on the Great Person front. He's at 305/420 Great Scientist points and I'm struggling to imagine him getting 105 points on his turn. It has to be this upcoming turn since I'll claim Darwin on my next turn when the projects complete. I am cautiously optimistic that this is going to work as planned next turn. Unfortunately, running the two district projects has caused Rome's beaker rate to skyrocket up to 157/turn. I say "unfortunately" because the other players are going to see that and start freaking out that we need to be taken down. I would have preferred to keep our strength hidden a bit better - it was almost kind of nice for a little while there when TheArchduke looked like the most dangerous player. Oh, who am I kidding, it's always better to be out in front as opposed to trailing. When you're ahead, you can dictate the flow of the game to a much greater extent. And a huge part of winning is demoralizing the other players; when they see big numbers like this, it makes them depressed and more likely to give up when things are going bad.

I should be clear though: this is a temporary effect. Rome's actual beaker rate is about 140/turn right now, still the best in the game but not quite as crazy. However, that doesn't take into effect scoring 2000 free beakers from Darwin, which will be absolutely massive if we can land it. 15 turns of research handed to us for free immediately? Yes please.



I have 10 quadriremes finished at the moment to go along with 5 caravels. There are 3 quadriremes currently in production, and I should be able to slip another one out of Firenze after it finishes the district project. I'm trying to set a hard limit of about 4-5 more turns for quadrireme building and then it's time to swap over to caravel training. After taking this picture, I actually changed civics research to Exploration, which will leave the civic 1 turn away from completion for easy finishing whenever we desire. I think I can get one caravel each out of Firenze, Venezia, and Palermo and then look to use Darwin in about 10 turns time from right now.
Elsewhere, my cities are going to be working on either builders or traders for the most part. I finished a Commercial district this turn and another one is finishing next turn, plus I will be swapping shortly into Merchant Republic which grants 2 additional trade route slots. That's four more traders to be built, which will be coming from my inland cities. The coastal cities are still building ships as fast as possible. I'm pretty comfortable with the current land army, and it's the navy that needs more work.

With Singaboy having vision on a good chunk of Germany's military, I decided to tally them up and see how much power was visible:



We can see 495 power right now of units; Germany has 751 total at the moment. That's pretty good stuff - we can see about 2/3rds of TheArchduke's units. Their team's power has not been going up at all, although they have started saving money and now have 1500 gold in the bank. (By the way, we actually PASSED them in gold/turn income this turn with an army that's 2.5x their size - nice!) With their team having a combined 225 gold/turn income, they will have enough money to upgrade all of these units. However... they will only have enough gold to upgrade all of their CURRENT units by Turn 135. They won't have enough money to build, say, ten more quadriremes and upgrade all of them along with their current units. Not unless they start getting a ton of funds from England/Nubia, which I guess we can't technically rule out. I think their team is making a mistake here, thinking that they can sit back with their current military and just upgrade everything and be OK. Germany's power has been flat for the last half-dozen turns and Russia's power has been flat forever, still only at 265 power in total. While they can upgrade what they currently have right now, that's overlooking the fact that we can also upgrade what we currently have right now. In other words, Germany can upgrade all these units and leap up from 700 power to 1200 power, but we can also do further upgrades and leap up from our current 1300 power and 1000 power to 1800 power and 1500 power respectively. I think it's going to be really hard for them to close the gap with our team; once you fall behind in power as badly as they have, it's tough to catch up barring a truly wasteful attack.

I think about three more turns until we ask Woden for a Declaration of Friendship to renew our period of peace. Until then, we continue to plan as though Germany is our next target.

[Modo]

That is quite interesting overall so I'll try to be brief

1) The relaxed way the other teams are playing after two decisive wars by a neighbor bigger than anyone else alone is puzzling, you don't have to own a Speaker enhanced paranoia radar to question it.

2) The joke about hiding the extra beakers actually has an interesting question behind it, is there a way to tone down your research if needed? I guess you could stop running specialists if you have them but other than that you're pretty much "forced" to use it.

3) I finally get your dilemma about Darwin, you have techs hidden behind other techs like this Industrialization into Steam Power play which means that the next tech has to get the final charge. Too bad they didn't implement a way to also deactivate a GP like this one so that you have more control over it's charges and I don't think there's a way the player can "deactivate" and reactivate it at will.

4) Nobody wants to trade with Rome but it would be truly shocking if even Singaboy refuses the truffles. :D

[Singaboy]

Turn 123:

First of all, I hope Rome can net that Great Scientist and really push us ahead in the tech race. The current stats will make us enemy #1 though. I doubt that England and Nubia would be so foolish to sign a DoF again. Let's see when it comes to that.

At the start of the turn I am greeted with the Inspiration for Mercantilism. Unfortunately, I have no space for triangular trade in my government cards. I could swap out Limes for Meritocracy, but I rather wait for a double swap which includes Serfdom and Professional Army for some upgrades.

My empire is looking good at the start of the turn. The new science district together with its adjacency effects has lifted science to almost 90 and Shanghai has finished its harbor to boost my income. I am still waiting for the Eureka for Printing so that I can go for cavalry. I hope Rome will supply me with that Eureka soon.



I was mentioning the civic double swap and how to make it happen. Of course, I need to pre build a couple builders, not just the one in Shangdu. Quanzhou will start a second builder next turn once the monument is done. Now, I am 1 turn away from Mercantilism, Exploration gets done the moment the Inspiration comes from Rome (or I upgrade two galleys myself). The enlightenment Inspiration could come from Rome soon too. I think, I will use the time when exploration kicks in for a double civic upgrading some of my galleys and archers as well as chariots. It will hurt my income but that has to be done sooner or later anyway. I would then stay in meritocracy as well which gives a boost of around 20 culture for me. Once that is done, I will head for civil engineering. By the way, which turn do you plan to finish exploration, Sulla? It would be good to know so I can plan accordingly.

Finally, would you believe it, finally on turn onehundredtwentythree, I have been given an amenity by Rome. Well, better now than never. And the effects are quite nice in fact. Have a look at the happy status of my cities before and after. From 3 ecstatic cities, my empire has now 7 of them. On top of boosting each city's production, it also slightly affects all other stats.

Now, at the German/Chinese border, there is a really interesting situation. I managed to squeeze in my horseman to block any slow unit from moving north and what do we spot? A settler which undoubtedly is trying to go for a canal city. Well, I am so sorry, but your settler is not going to reach any of those spots now, Archduke. he could found a city in the jungle which then blocks any canal city from being formed.
What do you think Sulla, shall we block his settler from founding a city at the land bridge? I could also pull back my horseman to allow his settler to move and found the city where his crossbow currently stands.

In the west, my roaming galleys runs into yet another settler, this time from Nubia. Is he trying to get to that Island in the north? The other noteworthy thing here is the proximity of Nubia and Germany. We need some friction here between those parties. I will send the galley south to check out the land between those two.

In the east, my knight has reached the coast and will explore English possessions a little, while my army is taking out the barbarians. The musket has already earned its promotion and the knight is gaining experience fast. Maybe I can get one of the horsemen to earn a promotion too.

Finally, a look at China at the end of the turn. With the added luxury, China's research has crossed the 90 mark. Income is > 130 gpt thanks to the harbor and the new banana plantation at Pagan. The builder that mined the hill at Shanghai will move south to improve Tianjin and harvest the stone to finish the encampment. I am hoping to line up that harvest with a second quadrireme. Maybe Kashgar can produce the third builder that I would finish with serfdom.

At Pagan, I will chop the forest north of the city into the current quadrireme (for the 100% bonus) to finish the lighthouse. Subsequently, I am planning to use another quadrireme to harvest the stone there too and finish the Great Lighthouse. It will require the purchase of the tile east of the harbor for around 140 gold.

Let's hope next turn has the good news about the Great Scientist in Rome's possession. All the best!

[Sullla]

Glad to see that the truffles had such a nice impact over there in China. On some of the other issues:

* I think we do want to get Meritocracy in place for China soon. Your civ may actually be stronger in culture now than Rome, heh. The Enlightenment will hopefully get boosted next turn, and then it's a 4 turns research for Rome to deliver the boost over to China. In the meantime, once The Enlightenment has hit 40% completion, I think China can start working on Civil Engineering, even if you don't want to finish it just yet because it obsoletes Limes. The two of us can ideally split up the Industrial era civics and knock them out fairly quickly. Maybe China can work on Nationalism and Civil Engineering while Rome works on Colonialism and Natural History? I should be able to land the boost for those latter two civics without too much trouble.

* I can't finish Exploration civic until I'm done building quadriremes because the civic obsoletes Maritime Industries policy. I expect to discover Exploration in about 4-5 more turns after finishing up the current round of quadriremes. If that ends up taking too long, you may want to upgrade two galleys and grab the boost for yourself, since I expect you'll be upgrading the galleys into caravels anyway. Obviously that requires running Professional Army policy for a little bit though, so it's up to you as to whether it's better to wait about 5 turns for Rome to deliver the boost of head for the upgrades yourself. Plan on Turn 128 or Turn 129 for the boost to arrive, that seems like a solid estimate.

* Printing is 2 turns from completion; I'll have the second university done at the end of turn 125, so the boost should pop over to China on Turn 126. Not much longer there.

* The big question: the German settler. First of all, that's an incredible job by Singaboy to block the unit from the tile where it wants to go. Awesome tactical play there. However... I think we actually do want Germany to settle a canal city, opening up the opportunity for Rome to capture it and use it to pass from the southern ocean into the western ocean. That's a bit of a risky strategy there, but we were thinking about sending one of our own settlers to that spot anyway. Might as well let the Germans build the city for us, right? I am not scared of a fleet vs fleet clash with TheArchduke, and I think the Roman navy could win that hands down. Then we can hopefully keep the dream alive of taking that spot and someday linking up our two navies together in the western ocean.

Ultimately therefore, I think that we let the German settler through to plant a city, even though the current positioning of the horseman is the totally awesome tactical play. That's a big decision though, so I'm curious to hear what you think Singaboy. Letting TheArchduke settle there is kind of the "high risk, high reward" play for us.

* Looks like Nubia is headed for that offshore island with one of the three settlers Woden currently has out on the map. More great scouting work from Singaboy's units - could be a future target for us someday. In an ideal world, Rome would sweet the eastern coast of Germany free of cities by razing everything there (no need to get involved in a drawn-out struggle, just burn it all down to deny port cities to Germany) then sail through the canal, capturing both cities there, and eventually linking up with China. We reach Steel tech right about this time and upgrade to battleships, followed by razing all of the German, Russia, Nubian, and English cities on the western ocean. With an unstoppable military force under our control, the other teams then concede. That's a very long way away but I can dream right?

* Those Chinese numbers at the top of the screen are amazing! 91 beakers/turn, 63 culture/turn without Meritocracy, and 132 gold/turn. Having all those Ecstatic cities definitely makes a difference. We are actually temporarily at a combined science rate of 248 beakers/turn against 170/turn for Russia/Germany and 161 for England/Nubia. We also have the highest gold/turn income in the game while also having by far the strongest military in the game. Not bad, not bad at all.

Tomorrow morning we'll find out if we landed Darwin. Here's hoping that he's ours and the crazy tech slingshot plan comes to fruition.

[Singaboy]

I agree with you on that settler. I will pull back my horseman and let Germany get to that spot. It will open up the eastern side of the land connection for their ships, so we better be prepared.

As for my faith accumulation by the way. I am still not too sure where we need troops most. I think cavalry is actually best suited for the open land over at ex-Kongo/Khmer, while the crossbows are needed in the west.

I will get 3 additional crossbows in the west within 10 turns and probably a few more horsemen in the west. I am glad we both have a healthy income at the moment, because we will really need that for all the unit upgrades. The ship upgrades alone will cost me 1000 gold, not to mention crossbows and cavalry/knights. We need some gold making machine here.

[Modo]

Not enough gold and faith income for China...yeah

Blocking the German settler then allowing it to settle isn't a telegraphed move? I mean they do expect you to attack but doing this will also let them know the extent of your planning and that's kinda important in the big picture (remember the settler troll Japper / Cornflakes pulled in response, surely all four teams would see the implications of your move if they get wind of it).
If you successfully attack Germany you can plant a city of your own so this looks like a tradeoff between a settler cost and tipping your hand.

[Sullla]

I was available all morning to play the turn, and then it arrived about 15 minutes after I left for the day. It figures. Anyway, turn is played and I wanted to throw out a couple quick important notes. Full turn report to come later tonight:

* We did *NOT* land Darwin. TheArchduke had either one or two district projects finish last turn and then used gold to patronage the rest of the Great Scientist. This really, really hurts - that's a swing of roughly 3000 beakers right there by missing the Great Person. However, we did claim a Great Scientist this turn (albeit a much weaker one), and TheArchduke has made a critical mistake. He spent 1100 gold to claim Darwin, and that doesn't leave him enough gold to upgrade his forces, which continue to stay at the same place without any power increases. We need to punish him for this by smashing him in 10 turns when we can attack. More on this later.

* Singaboy, TheArchduke has embarked his settler. I think you should hold your horseman in position for at least this turn, forcing him to sail around your unit. He'll get his canal city (which we want him to have!) but he'll have to waste a few more valuable turns embarking and moving around your unit. Then you can evacuate the horse in a turn or two to save the unit.

* One other request: I think you should offer Woden and Chevalier Declarations of Friendship on your turn. They might be more likely to accept if the offer is coming from you, and it's worth a shot. If you offer this turn, they would accept on Turn 125, and that would buy us until Turn 156 until they could attack us. Given that their power has not increased at all and their civs are building settlers, I think there's a decent chance they will agree.

As I said, more to come later tonight. Still disappointed about Darwin.

[Sullla]

OK, here we go with Turn 124. This turned out to be a disappointing turn for us. I saw the "Claim Great Person" icon pop up on the interface and I thought for sure that we had grabbed Darwin. As I turned out, I was mistaken:



The Great Person was Mendeleev, not Darwin. I was flabbergasted at this initially and couldn't understand how it had happened. A check of the Great Persons Recruited screen confirmed that TheArchduke was indeed the one who had snagged Darwin. How did he do it? I was certain that even if he ran multiple district projects he still would have fallen short of being able to beat us to Darwin. And yet there it was on the interface, Germany sitting there with 0.9 Scientist points after having successfully recruited Darwin. When I ran the math on the district projects, I couldn't even see how TheArchduke could have reached that number of Great Scientist points. His natural Scientist point generation would have put him at 320/420 points, and his district projects should have been worth about 40 Scientist points right now. So how do you get to the exact number of 420.9 points needed here?

Well, the answer is that you don't generate Great Scientist points, you recruit the desired guy with gold:



TheArchduke spent 1100 gold to patronage Darwin, dropping from 1168 to the 68 gold displayed here. I track everyone's gold every turn and it was obvious that that's how he made this happen. We can even work backwards from the Great Person recruitment formula to see how TheArchduke did this:

The cost of rushing a great people with gold or faith is:
For faith : 150+ 10*GP point remaining
For gold : 200+ 15*GP point remaining.

That works out to 900 / 15 = 60 Scientist points remaining. So TheArchduke finished one district project on his turn, gained 40 points from it (just as I expected he would get), then he had just enough gold to patronage the rest. It wasn't really that close on money either, since he could have borrowed more gold from EmperorK if necessary to land Darwin. Furthermore, my turn plays before TheArchduke so this wasn't a bad luck result due to turn order. TheArchduke legitimately won this race by a full turn.

Still... argh, what a pain in the butt for us! Look at the Great Scientist point counter in that screenshot above, where I landed the double Campus district project timed to hit on exactly the correct turn to put Rome at 422/420 points. Rome leaped up 15 + 45 + 45 = 105 points on the last turn with no wasteage in a perfect execution to grab the Great Scientist. I could not have had the district projects finish any sooner, it wouldn't have been enough to claim the Great Person. It just sucks really badly to time it all out perfectly like this and have TheArchduke get the prize we wanted. Furthermore, Darwin represents a massive swing of beakers. We could have used him for 2000 free beakers, while TheArchduke will now get roughly 1000 beakers for himself. (He can't access the Pantanal and that's the only 4-tile natural wonder in the game. He'll probably get either 1000 or 1500 beakers from the ability.) This would have been massive for us to leap forward a generation of naval technology and have ironclads on hand for the beginning of this war against TheArchduke. Now they're a lot further away than that, and all future techs will be delayed while TheArchduke jumps forward himself to an area of his own desire.

Now it's not all doom and gloom though. I put this in the short teaser post earlier tonight, but this is a key point: TheArchduke just spent 1100 gold *NOT* investing into unit upgrades. He now has 10 more turns left before we can declare war, and the current power standings look like this:

Rome: 1360
China: 993
Germany: 771
Russia: 265

We have a vastly larger army, we have more gold on hand in our treasury, and we are actually making more money than their team despite that vastly larger army. TheArchduke has just given us the green light to go smash him up in 10 turns, because there's no way he can muster enough gold to match the military we can field with our current armies + our own upgrades. Weirdly enough, I think this whole Great Scientist play has committed us more than ever to aggression against Russia/Germany, because they just spent a massive sum of money on *NOT* modernizing their army, and they still don't appear to be building more units. Perhaps they erroneously think that TheArchduke's units get to benefit from Defender of the Faith? They will be in for a very rough surprise if that's the case.



I already covered this in the short post (and Singaboy has already played his turn), but I'll mention it again here. TheArchduke embarked his settler, so can keep his horseman in place for a turn or two to keep blocking Germany's units. We will need to evacuate the horse next turn by moving it onto the tile where the southwest chariot is located. Then TheArchduke will occupy that tile with his warrior to claim it for his settler, but he'll have to move BACK down to the south side of the water to get his settler into position. Wasting a few turns here will delay him settling, building walls, sending ships through the canal, etc. I don't even think this necessarily looks like us guiding him to a spot so much as retreating a horse once it looks like it's in a dangerous position. Well, we shall see what happens. I think TheArchduke wants that canal city regardless - I can't see where else he would be sending this unit.



Elsewhere, I did improve this pearls resource at Firenze with the last charge on this builder. That gave me another amenity to play around with along with creating another nice tile for the city to work: 2 food, 4 gold, and 1 culture/turn. Firenze is following up the completion of its Campus district project with a 2-turn quadrireme, and I love the fact that this landlocked city can crank out ships from its Harbor district.

Lost in the disappointment of missing Darwin was the fact that I did recruit Mendeleev this turn, and he counted as the third Great Person for The Enlightenment boost. That gave me a free envoy at Bandar Brunei for completing a quest, and somewhat surprisingly made me the suzerain of the city state:



Yeah, four envoys was enough to do it, go figure. I doubt that we can hold control of this city state longterm, but we'll take advantage of the place while we have it. Bandar Brunei provided vision on two Russian cities, and it looks as though TheArchduke and EmperorK have a weird arrangement on their continent: Germany seems to have all of the "good" terrain while Russia has all of the crummy tundra lands. That's a novel approach and it does make use of Russia's unique ability to generate faith and production from tundra. However, it also seem to explain why EmperorK's Russia has been so weak throughout the game and I don't know if it was the best strategy. Sure, Russia has a lot of cultural output now (finally), but EmperorK's science is terrible and he has no military to speak of. If we can decisively defeat Germany, then this team is effectively finished. We don't need to waste time trying to conquer Russian tundra wastelands, just raze or capture the German cities along the coast and they're toast.

Keep in mind that I can only see two Russian cities and this could be completely wrong. Still, it would explain what I've been seeing throughout the game in the Demographics. I think I'm on the right track here.



Overview in the Roman core. I had some nice overflow from the Campus district project in Roma and the university will only take 1 turn to finish, nice. Next up is a military engineer to build two useless forts for the Ballistics boost; I think it will take 5 or 6 turns for the engineer and then a couple more turns to build the forts. I should have the tech done just before our war with Germany starts barring something unexpected happening. We will definitely want some field guns, especially for China's more fixed defenses. Second settler finishes from Ostia next turn for the hole in the Roman "doughnut", although I may hold off on actually planting until we see TheArchduke settle the canal city. We need that spot one way or another and I won't be getting another settler probably ever for the game. Elsewhere, I'm finishing up with quadriremes and preparing builders for another brief Serfdom period.



It's much the same down here in former Kongo lands. I think the quadrireme out of Ravenna will be the last one that I build, and it will leave me with 14 total. Is that enough frigates? Well, I can always build some more. I do want to get started on cranking out some more caravels for ironclad upgrades. The one upside of losing Darwin is that I have more time for caravel builds, heh. Singaboy, this means that I'm planning to finish Exploration civic in 3 turns, delivering the boost to you on Turn 127. I will complete Square Rigging the next turn on Turn 128 and get ready for frigate upgrades.

Great Scientist Mendeleev isn't terribly useful, but he does boost one random Industrial technology (along with Chemistry which is a near-useless Modern era tech). Once we land the boost for Ballistics and finish researching The Enlightenment civic to boost Scientific Theory, we can play slot machine with this guy and hope for a useful boost. We'll have 50/50 odds to get either Industrialization or Steam Power; the other two options will be Sanitation and Economics. We may as well spin the wheel and hope to get lucky there.



Did you know that EmperorK enhanced his faith this turn? Yeah, the score increase caught me off guard at first. He picked Lay Ministry which is a pretty weak choice if you ask me: +1 faith on Holy Sites and +1 culture on Theatre districts. This appears to have been worth about 7 faith/turn and 2 culture/turn, and I'm questioning if that was worth while. The apostle cost him 380 faith (I think that's what Singaboy say the current price was, something like that) and the faith payback cost is therefore in the dozens of turns. For a minimal culture gain, that doesn't seem worth it. This team doesn't appear to be taking the threat of impending war very seriously; EmperorK should be using his sizable faith income for purchasing units right now, not enhancing his religion.

I also suggested that Singaboy ask England/Nubia for a Declaration of Friendship extention, and hopefully we'll get a positive response next turn. We won't know for a day though since Singaboy plays after the two of them.

Overall, not a great turn for us. We're doing great in this game and yet we've narrowly lost almost all of our major races: Jesuit Education, Venetian Arsenal, Darwin, etc. I feel like if we had landed any of these we might have put the game to bed already. It's hard to complain too much though:



Numbers still look great across the board. Oh, and in case you missed it: Rome actually made more money this turn than China, 133 to 131 gold per turn. Bet you never thought you'd see THAT day anytime soon!

[Singaboy]

Turn 124:

Well, this is just crazy. We lost on many accounts those close races. I hope someone else lost on a wonder race. We wouldn't know. Let's hope this gold splurge will get Archduke regret in 10 turns when he faces a navy he can't defend against.

I also have the hope that England will accept my DoF as Germany suddenly seems to be the rival to beat. If we can lock England and Nubia into a DoF, the loss of the Great Scientist might be a blessing after all.

Well, my turn was pretty quiet as it is currently. I sure need to get serious about my military. For that, I am planning to upgrade plenty of units soon. I would love to swap civics in three turns with mercantilism, then chop the last walls at Quanzhou into a commercial district.

Let's have a look at the situation on the front lines first. Well, that German settler cam't reach the tile the crossbow is at as it has cliffs. Hence, I moved my chariot in such a fashion that his settler can land in 2 turns, then move onto the crossbow tile and settle in 4 turns. I am not certain if he actually wants that. The other possibility would be a city on the Island just north of Tallin. Next tunr we will know his intentions.



In the west, I continue with my explorations and together, we have almost circumnavigated the world. Now bonus in this game for it though. Nubia is determined to settle on that small island. I get the impression that England has its naval cities all on the southern coast, pretty hard to reach for us.




In the east, I do more scouting around England and continue my skirmishes with the barbarians. The muskets gets its promotion and the knight striking that camp, has earned its promotion too
Next round, I am going to hit the camp with my horseman. It won't be enough to earn a promotion. I am glad to increase the strength of my troops this way though.

Finally an overview of my core, the eastern cities are really not producing anything right now in a meaningful manner. Quanzhou as mentioned has finished its monument, boosting culture a little bit. Once in meritocracy, we will be combined #1 for culture too. Shanghai is getting a quadrireme out next turn. I need more of those. Quanzhou starts a crossbow, even though it takes 8 turns. I can't just rely on drafting as they cost too much faith. For this reason, Kashgar stops the battering ram one turn shy of finishing and start a horseman that can be done in reasonable time.

Hangzhou starts a builder, though this is a little late and I might have a problem with serfdom here. I would like that builder to start harvesting stuff to get the city to size 15.

Pagan is about to get its lighthouse chopped next turn to finish the quadrireme. It will then wait for the next quadrireme to be almost finished to get the wonder harvested. I could, of course, use 2 builder charges to speed the wonder up a little. Seems almost too wasteful at the moment. Let's hope I can finish that wonder for some nice gpt and faith boost and the extra naval movement.

I am a little hesitant to write something about the DoF deal with England as I feel it would curse that deal. Let's see how they feel about Germany and Russia, two nations that have merely been sitting back hoping to play their advantages.