[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Fintourist]

We are kinda going through a frustrating phase of this game as this is really the moment when the damage that we took earlier becomes visible.  People with solid starts are accelerating their snowball: Mack won the neighbor lottery and is securing himself very much needed additional land. TBS simultaneously goes forward with a nice flashy Hanging Gardens play. There are certainly a handful of other players that we know nothing of, but are also doing equally well. Or at least almost.

Meanwhile we have fought ourselves back into an average position in this 25-player game and try to put together our best micro.. to reach Writing. And then we struggle to Alpha.. so that we can build research to reach Currency.. so that we can build wealth to reach something useful.. This is annoyingly  passive path as the distance between us and the leaders grows during the period. But it is kinda our only choice to keep some kind of chances alive. I guess we could have teched HBR instead of MC and now try to reach Construction instead of Currency, but that would be going all-in. We don't have the economy to support further unit costs so we would need Toku or OT4E to sleep so much that we could take all their cities and finance our economy with city capture gold. While I think neither of those guys is playing their best in this game, they will still be hard-to-swallow Protective empires.

Our best chance in this game relies on our neighbors getting soon into major conflict with Elkad or GJ, so that we could pile on Toku/OT4E and reap the benefits. If we need to do the heavy-lifting ourselves, I guess we eventually get somewhere, but at that time somebody already will sit in the darkness with 50 cities and performs some kind of a nice Liberalism into Future Tech move. 

[Old Harry]

Turn 88

Our exploring immortal has come a long way.


We have 52 hammers into the Great Lighthouse now, we'll get it about turn 98. At the moment we're on target to get a new island city on t95, so that would work pretty well. Obviously some failgold gets us to currency quicker than the current estimate of t102, so I'm just going to keep obsessing about it.

Next turn our axe will move to this corn tile, then he can find out what's going on in OT4E's new city on turn 90. OT can declare on t93, so this might be useful intel.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 89

Looks like Joey will be declaring war to get through our territory soon. Do we let him? Our galley can sit at a pinch-point to block without killing his work boat. Also note the number of scientists getting born everywhere before we've even got our first library up!


War weariness between OT4E and Joey is down by 8 in ten turns, this makes me think nothing further has occured and OT is planning a strike at us. So our axes and archers are shuffling towards Baldur's Gate and Elite Dangerous.


Our axe, Ray, can actually stay on the forest this turn for extra safety, rather than moving to the corn, because the deer tile is forested and blocking OT's line of sight here. We'll find out what's happening at the new city next turn.


Plans for settling the island are delayed because I put a turn into the barracks in Col accidentally last turn. New settling date is t96. This is fine as we'd like to sign a new peace with Toku at that point anyway...


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 90

OT paranoia mostly rules this turn. He whipped three times this turn, but not in cities on our border, so we're not going into a whipping frenzy just yet. This galley *should* just be an island settling party, so we sent a fish-fish deal to let him know we're fine with that. Maybe that's dumb because he's settling for crabs? Should have sent crabs for crabs!


Our scouting axe discovered an archer in Theanae this turn. That's good news.


Demos, power, crop and mfg. OT is keeping up with our forge hammers, but the food looks nice. We'll start working scientists over the next 3-4 turns in Civ, DA and FFH. BG will follow suit in about ten turns, once we have or don't have the Great Lighthouse.

[Old Harry]

Turn 91

I'm posting this report a day and a half after playing but it remains current as Joey went MIA and 2metra paused. Hopefully we get another turn tonight... Anyway: there's still no Great Lighthouse from anyone else. If someone is going to beat us to it it'd be nice if it was soon so we can kick-start our economy. Down south our scout finds blue borders - are they TBS, Donovan, BGN or Xenu? (Hopefully not the former given how good a team he and Joey seem to make.)


We're feeling okay about OT right now. Although the spear sitting under this Immortal is a little concerning. We can run away easily enough next turn.


And our flotilla is on its way to the northern island.   Toku is saving cash on construction right now, and cats would be problematic for us so our tech path is provisionally Alpha-Currency-Machinery as crossbows eat axes, spears and catapults. It's on the way to the Astro-bulb as well so that still sounds appealing.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 92

The borders down south belong to Donovan, so no more known-tech bonus for us. Hopefully Toku vs Elkad is a hot war. The number of Axes (3) and spears (3) in Elkad's front city makes me think that it could be, but also that Toku would be silly to attack him, so might just turn his attention to us. He can declare on us on t96. No new war weariness from anyone, disappointingly.


OT has a trireme to go with the galley, and his new city teleported our immortal south west. Things would be tense here (as he gets 90% odds to kill it with his spear) but he sent back a fish-fish deal. Since he double-moved us to settle this city and trap the immortal I'd be astonished if he kills it. We should perhaps put some hammers into a trireme in one of our cities.


Next turn our peace treaty with Elkad ends and we could kill this warrior to get our great general to settle in Elite. But that seems mean somehow.


Demos and power.

[Fintourist]

Regarding macro stuff:

• I think OH deduced from tech thread or somewhere that mackoti started next to Aretas AND B4ndit, who does not seem to be doing too hot. Oh well.  Neighbor lottery is just always the biggest lottery in these games and it seems that mack is one of the winners. Not his fault of course.
  
• We have spent some time simming and planning our 40-turn plan from here. And actually it made at least me a bit more optimistic that we can work our way out of this economic hole and do something semi-relevant in this game. Meaning a) I think OT4E and William will struggle even more to fix their economies and we should get an upper hand in the mid-term.. and hopefully eat one or both of our neighbors, and b) I have faith in our Astro plan. Proper commitment for it might give us another tool for improving our position a decent bit.    Oh well, just wait 10 turns and surely our waters are full of OT4E triremes, Toku is coming at us with cats and we are back to complete irrelevancy and dogfight.. 
  

[Zalson]

• We have spent some time simming and planning our 40-turn plan from here. And actually it made at least me a bit more optimistic that we can work our way out of this economic hole and do something semi-relevant in this game. Meaning a) I think OT4E and William will struggle even more to fix their economies and we should get an upper hand in the mid-term.. and hopefully eat one or both of our neighbors, and b) I have faith in our Astro plan. Proper commitment for it might give us another tool for improving our position a decent bit.    Oh well, just wait 10 turns and surely our waters are full of OT4E triremes, Toku is coming at us with cats and we are back to complete irrelevancy and dogfight.. 
  

Do you think you could expound on your sim? Does it also include the worst-case scenario that you tongue-in-cheek indicated of the waters full of OT4E triremes and Toku cat attack on T102?

I guess what I'm really hoping is that in addition to a +40 simulation, you also simulate the near-term moves of your neighbors to consider possible counter-punches to their punches. And then you also simulate their reaction to your reaction to their reaction, etc etc.

[Old Harry]

Do you think you could expound on your sim? Does it also include the worst-case scenario that you tongue-in-cheek indicated of the waters full of OT4E triremes and Toku cat attack on T102?

I guess what I'm really hoping is that in addition to a +40 simulation, you also simulate the near-term moves of your neighbors to consider possible counter-punches to their punches. And then you also simulate their reaction to your reaction to their reaction, etc etc.

Nope, we're planning this in the hope of perfect behaviour from our neighbours, which clearly won't happen (see report below) but things are so fluid with all the different relationships (is Toku really fighting Elkad seriously? Is OT still fighting GJ?) that it's not worth losing sleep over what'll happen in 20 turns. It's bad enough panicking every ten turns as it is... There are enough micro and macro decisions to get on with without including those variants.

We do try to leave ourselves as flexible as possible but we're really hoping we can surf through the next thirty turns without attracting any more problems. Even then I don't see us catching the leaders.

Turn 93

Bad news. Toku has sailing and has an archer on the island. Hopefully the settler is a couple of turns behind, but there's no way of knowing just yet.


We'll offer him a split of the island (we settle for copper and he goes for sheep) and see how he reacts. If he offers the same deal back or accepts then we're best mates (until Astronomy). If not then we're going to have a problem getting trade routes at currency. (If he accepts and loses his copper that'll be pretty funny...)


Meanwhile we see an opportunity to get that great general we need...


Imm vs warrior - 98%... WIN (3 hits!)

The great general is born in Civ and will head toward ED to settle t95 and get us some 5XP units.

I offer straight peace to try to trick Elkad into accepting, then follow up with this as an apology.


Demos and power.

[Fintourist]

Turn 94

Exciting times in the north. Let's see whether we can share the little island peacefully or if things escalate.. (There's a Toku archer below our immortal and a settler in our galley)




In the south we have potentially a chance to make even more friends by sniping this city... or Donovan's axe




Our demos are somewhat above average and we still have a power lead over our neighbors, but it's time to add some more units:

Do you think you could expound on your sim? Does it also include the worst-case scenario that you tongue-in-cheek indicated of the waters full of OT4E triremes and Toku cat attack on T102?

I guess what I'm really hoping is that in addition to a +40 simulation, you also simulate the near-term moves of your neighbors to consider possible counter-punches to their punches. And then you also simulate their reaction to your reaction to their reaction, etc etc.

 Yeah.. Not sure how serious you were, but I'm still gonna use every opportunity to talk about spreadsheets.. So basically we were trying to sim our tech pace and plan how to reach our next economic goals (Astronomy & Civil Service). Here's a pic of a simple tool that I constructed for optimizing our space race in PB18 and now for this sim.




So basically what we did:

• Simmed the next 10ish turns to see how Alpha & Currency push & other stuff improves our economy
  
• Used rough assumptions for estimating our tech pace during the next period
  

As for results, we now have a rough timeline to plan around. If all goes well we can buld Astronomy ~T126 and complete Civil Service ~T130. We also confirmed that the science, and not great person production will be the bottleneck here, which will impact our turn-by-turn city management. Aaand our best guess is that if we need to divert to Construction or HBR we should expect a delay of ~3 turns in our plan.

We are still working on the counter-punch scenario    But safe to say that we are expecting our world to turn into flames, before we actually get to execute the plan.