[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 71 pt 2

Just a quickie to say: OT4E is a NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOB! He's got three workers on here to build the road and pasture, so he wasted two worker turns to get them here. Also he's going to delay hooking Ivory until he moves away and builds another road.  (You can tell he didn't road and then bring the workers on because the road would be drawn on the tile going to the edge, not hidden in the middle behind the worker.)


I did send him this (after the turn rolled, oops!) to let him save those worker turns. Let's see if he accepts.


Demos and power (I forgot to grab them after the turn roll to see if Toku is planning anything).

Perhaps a galley from AC and a settler from, um, Col again?

Ships from Alpha Centauri and settlers from Colonization would be nicely thematic   .  Do you need any other reasoning?

Um, does a ship from Baldur's Gate work the same? Afraid that's what you're going to have to put up with!

[Mardoc]

Um, does a ship from Baldur's Gate work the same? Afraid that's what you're going to have to put up with!

Nope, it's just not the same.  I guess I'll have to start rooting for OT4E and William now    

at least until they next do something unthematic just because it makes more sense in *this* game

[Old Harry]

Well just let's hold on a minute here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate_(city)

History

The city takes its name from the great seafaring hero Balduran.[1] Long ago, Balduran sailed to the fabled Anchorome and returned with great wealth which was used to build the wall around what became Baldur's Gate. He left the city again, presumably to return to Anchorome, but never returned.

At the time, the growing town was controlled by local farmers who mercilessly taxed incoming shipments. This infuriated ship captains, who believed that since the harbor wasn't walled in, its traffic should not be taxed, and they eventually overthrew the farmers. The four eldest captains ruled the city together, and jokingly called themselves "dukes," which stuck.

Now you have to root for us. Sucker!

(because the boats we build will bring great wealth, see?)

[Mardoc]

(because the boats we build will bring great wealth, see?)

I can't argue with that logic

I may even have to install the copy of BG I own, and try to get further than character creation for once

[Old Harry]

Turn 72

I can't do the peace in our time speech again, can I? No? Well in any case OT4E took peace and we can send our troops east to keep Toku honest. Down south Elkad might be planning to hit our poor Immortal, so we declared and offered him a peace treaty too.


Not much else happening this turn so I'll do a city dump for those who love planning city micro. Two more due to be settled next turn.

Demos and all the graphs. Looks like Toku has maxed out his happiness and started working some mines.

And since I rolled the turn we have graphs for t73 as well (will play the turn after we figure the micro out!) Is the upturn in the graph ominous?

[Fintourist]

After 15 disastrous turns (from T50 stonehenge loss to peace with Toku, and from no.1 in demos to weaker half of the pack) we have now had a bunch of more productive turns. In addition to slowing down OT4E we reach this turn 9 cities and 5 granaries, which on paper is somewhat competitive. But I guess the demos tell the real story.

I can see us improving our position somewhat in the coming turns if our neighbors don’t force another whipping spree, but I think a decent gap will remain between us and relevancy. At this point I’m semi-confident that despite the pretty straightforward 2v1 setting we could win a 3-player micro PBEM here with Toku and OT4E…

…But of course this is a 25-player Pitboss. And in that context we are slowly approaching mid-game with broken economy and limited tools: IMP helped us to a T50 lead, but that is gone. IND will give us cheap forges, but we are probably too much behind to compete for the better wonders. Our neighbors are not doing too well, but I think they both still have top 5 power in this game and should have their eyes open. As Toku and OT4E did not manage to hurt us enough and we did not become an easy conquest, similarly, OT4E did not turn into easy conquest despite our successful raid (for a brief moment when I thought that we might get to burn his capital, it felt promising).

In PB18 we played pretty much our sandbox for the first 100 turns, then ate a neighbor, then the next, and the next. In the big picture the snowball kept rolling for the whole game. If in this game someone gets to play a similarly clean game, catching up will probably be impossible. So here’s the hoping that everyone in the fog gets into trouble! Rival power jumped quite a bit this turn.. Let’s hope this means a mutually destructive slug between contenders and not an easy snack for someone.

My personal attitude in these games is always that there will only be one winner and the rest are losers. Therefore it has actually been quite surprising how fun the last few turns have been and I feel that our team is at the moment very motivated. We just wan’t to keep making plays, try to outplay our neighbors and improve our position turn by turn and see how far it gets us.

[Old Harry]

Turn 73

Elkad didn't kill our Immortal and offered peace back so that's the end of our fifth war of the game so far. We'll explore around OT4E's south side, but I expect we just find coast. I'm not sure exactly where Donovan came from though, so perhaps there will be another neighbour to contact?


Our latest cities, Goldeneye and Harrier Attack are founded. Write-ups to come. After we stop arguing about how to stimulate our flagging economy.


Demos and power. Is that a blip from Tokugawa or the start of a spike?

[Old Harry]

Turn 74 pt 1

Interesting news from the event log - not content with attacking those fish and the wheat Tokugawa has been at war with Donovan (another scout killing?) and is now at war with Elkad. This is good news for our fears of his coming back for war pt 2 next turn... Our northern immortal was going to move SE-SE to check that there aren't workers on the forest tile SW of Toku's new city to allow him to hit Col from the fog with chariots. But a forest grew THIS TURN! Stupid RNG still hates us! So instead we could move east to the grass hill (to spy on Toku's city and discover if there is already a road on the suspect forest tile) or south to the plains forest (no reason) or hill (which lets our immortal get on our road network next turn), or just stay put (to heal).


Thanks to my bumbling the immortal onto a deer tile a couple of turns ago (which looks like it doesn't have forest on but apparently does) we're a turn slow getting to the pigs to pillage them. Should we still move to the pigs to force OT to pillage them or move back to our culture or over to locate Toku's new city (see tech thread for details) and see if his war with Elkad is real?


Demos and power. It looks like Tokugawa isn't building up for war, so I think we can go easy on our defensive plan. We have a spear behind walls in DA, so I think we want to move our zone defence Immortal into Colonization. The city could finish another and still get the settler we want out in time, but we've probably got enough defenders now.

Still to do:
- Choose build in Civ (Pyramids or Great Wall for failgold?)
- Whip barracks in AC
- Settler or complete imm in Col?
- Granary or complete imm in DA?

[Old Harry]

Turn 74 part 2

I decided to get a peek at Toku's city. The two spears is an excellent sign - our immortals have him turtling nicely! Swords might be a thing for us at some point in the future...


I've been thinking some more about overseas territory, the number of tiles in the world and that if we want to claim more than our fair share we should be looking to bulb astronomy with two great scientists. Fog-gazing from the north I think there is a strip of ice then there are forests and hills further on. I moved around a bit until I found a gap in the ice, NW of our territory, so if we do get ocean-borne then that's the direction to go first.

[Old Harry]

Meanwhile I've got a city to tell you about:

Game: Harrier Attack
Released: 1983
First played: 1988ish
Personal rating: Just. One. More. Bombing. Run.


Probably the first game I played to death. And what a lot of deaths there were! It's a side-scrolling Falklands War-based shooter, with even the lower skill level killing you time after time after time. Often at the hands of the very first enemy (annoyingly there were about ten seconds of flying every game before you got to be killed repeatedly by this guy). Each run lasted two minutes (often a lot less), but it kept me coming back for years.

In your state-of-the-art jet you could dodge enemy fire, drop bombs and fire odd guided missiles that would stay at the same altitude as your plane as you moved it up and down. I never quite mastered the art of bringing a missile down on the enemies heads, but bombing an enemy plane from above never lost it's appeal.

Getting to the final town with all the high-scoring targets was really hard, between the enemy planes hiding in the clouds and the temptation to get a bit close to the ground to take out tanks, but bombing the roof off those buildings was so satisfying. Then your Harrier headed home. Provided you hadn't bombed your aircraft carrier as you set off. In which case you would just fly on until you ran out of fuel and ditched into the sea.