[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 147

Toku's chariot fell into our trap, and took on the 9% fight... But then withdrew from battle. Then it promo-healed. We'll just heal in place.


Hitru captured the barb city for us (we lost a sword at 70% in the process), I renamed it Xcom. Then we settled two more cities. Yuri's Revenge is our first Australian city, with pretty harsh distance maintenance. These forests might make a good forbidden palace once we have enough courthouses.


Zeewolf locks off the NW corner of the new world. It looks like TBS was heading this way with the highlighted galleon, hope he's not too disappointed - he's got plenty of filler city options south of Miracle and it looks like he's got nearly as few units over here as we do. We sent a fish-fish deal to indicate that we love him and we won't contest those fish and we won't be settling anything else he might want. That should all be clearly understood, right? At some point we'll want to settle SE of gems and between Xcom and Zeewolf, but those can wait until we've claimed everything we can in Australia.


The next two settling parties are on their way and should land next turn.


Costs went up by 8gpt with each new city this turn, possibly because of their distance. We'll probably stop producing settlers in favour of wealth for a little while.


Our main rivals for city count - TBS, Mack, dtay have all invested very few EPs so far (if someone has 100% they've made the same as us in the game so far and we have one) that could mean they've also built very few courthouses. I think anyone with 97% doesn't have a single courthouse. Naufrager has built a lot, hopefully giving him an edge in his battle with Mackoti. GJ (off screen) is investing a lot of EPs into us so I switched back to try to get research visibility on Toku again.


I'm a bit obsessed with creating overview maps of the world as I want to figure out who is near to the astro-land that remains unclaimed. If we find no sign of TBS in Australia then it's likely that blue ????? is the other continent he's expanding to. Along those lines the ?????'s to the north east of Mackland is likely to be colonized by him sooner or later. We need to watch for him settling a bunch of new cities suddenly. Do we want to try to contest that island or concentrate on Aussie? Or do we wait for him to start expanding over there and try some piracy? Does anyone have a better name than New World?


Over at Tacape we're ready to start whittling OT4E's defenders away. We start with the trebuchet since we want the hitters to have as much health as possible to keep attacking over the next few turns.
- Treb vs CG2 archer 72% withdraw... WITHDRAWS!
And it hit every archer in the place! Now our swords should be able to do some damage...


- CR2 Sword vs CG1 archer 94%... WIN (4 hits - that's a couple more than average unfortunately)
- C2 sword vs CG1 archer 92%... WIN (3 hits - better but still not great)

We have some more swords and immortals (including our great general healer) heading over to join the party, but we probably won't take the city for another 4-5 turns...

Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 148

Toku whipped 11 times this turn. I guess that means he's completing Guilds eot. Hopefully he then needs to whip again to complete the knights next turn. That means they'll mostly appear t150. We upped our own schedule and *should* complete Guilds eot150 ourselves, we also finally completed Chichen Itza (having spent the last five turns hoping someone would do it for us and give us the cash to get to Guilds sooner).


We might need a load of wealth builds to get us to Guilds in that time frame, which is a problem since half our cities are barely villages yet. We get our great scientist for the next golden age eot, so will we be switching into slavery next turn? I hope not... (HA became wealth in KotoR and spear became catapult in DA after taking this shot.)


Given that it'll take a couple of turns for the knights to gather we should have a shot at repelling him with the loss of perhaps one city. He'll know that since he has tech visibility on us, so unless he's still set on revenge for planting Dragon Age we think this should push him to attack Elkad again. This would be fine by us and we'll happily sit back and watch, but we definitely need to be ready just in case.


In other news, looking through the trade screen we discover that Commodore has gold, so has he started colonizing too? As Fintourist says "It wouldn’t be out of Com’s character to play for astro adventures". We know that he's fought with plako and Gavagai which would put him in competition for the southern continent we theorised that TBS has been settling. Or Australia. He also started a golden age recently, so hopefully he's going to be a check on TBS' expansion prospects. There are only a few players whose location we're not sure of - denoted with question marks - and I'm theorizing two more continents the size of Australia/Westworld (new name c/o Hitru) - does that fit with what we know about total land tiles?


The barbs are coming out to play in Australia. This phase of the game always reminds me of the damage the colonization efforts of my own country (and others) have done around the world. Obviously we'll still bring enough units to ensure the security of the new cities.

One last thing - why is the south coast of the continent so much less abundant than the north? There'd better be some amazing goodies in the fog, you hear?


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 149

We started our golden age. It means we can get guilds fairly easily in two turns, but we're not quite building all the units I'd like. We hawked a bunch of resources around to Adrien, Rusten and Donovan to minimise the number of wealth builds we need next turn.

Next city gets founded in the barren wastes of Australia. Our second settling party landed 1S of the iron and will wander inland looking for the fountain of youth.


Toku has 13 cities, he didn't whip his island city or the one on the border with us and Elkad. He whipped 11 cities last turn and nine this turn so he'll have 2 Knights ready already and 9 more ready at the end of the turn. But then we discover this:


Looks like we were wrong about him aiming for Elkad. We offer peace again and he has tech visibility on us so perhaps we'll dent his optimism? This is where we leave our units at the end of turn - I'm concerned that the DA stack is a feint and he'll put a stack next to Elite next turn or the turn after. How many units do we need then?


And up north we try to threaten his northern cities to pin some units up there.


If we avoid getting bogged down in a war what religion should we start spreading? Civ hasn't got anything else to build right now so it could make missionaries. KotoR can back it up.


Demos and power and the victory screen. The gap to Mack is still scary.

[Old Harry]

Turn 150

Peace in our time! Again! Toku offered peace back after we offered it last turn and we snapped his hand off. Now this is a massive relief as we can stick with caste and keep our great people plan going - it must be down to our excellent macro decision to complete Chicken Pizza and guilds so quickly. Here is his force heading towards the Elkad border. I'm inclined to try to give Elkad support this time instead of piling on, but I have some very bloodthirsty team mates who need sating, so who knows what will happen.


Our cities in Westworld are starting to grow and become productive. Only having 6 workers for 7 cities probably isn't helping that development, but we have too many other priorities...


In Australia we finally discover food. We'll settle fish/clam in a few turns time. We can settle the highlighted tile next turn, but a barbarian in the fog might get there before our crossbow could, so we might not want to take that risk... Although the barbs seem to be beelining Yuri's Revenge, so perhaps we'll be clear?


We take the shot at the spear now that it moved to flat ground.


- Xbow vs Spear 99.7%... WIN!!! (1 hit)

Our Xbow will then move NW to confront the two axes, but we need to get some more units up here - we should have a couple of maces by turn 154. Settling the west coast of the continent is probably a priority too.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 151

Lots of guns vs butter debate this turn, which ended up with a firm decision to make buttery guns. Most of them will come from Elite making eight 10XP knights over the next eight turns.


Dreylin comes to visit Westworld. He has optics, but not Astro yet so hopefully he'll be so depressed about the lack of available land that he doesn't bother teching it and using Berzerkers on us.


Australia's west coast looks very nice. Currently 2 axes and a warrior are bearing down on Yuri's Revenge, but our crossbow should deal with them easily.


Too many signs! We'll load some maces onto a galleon next turn and chain them to Australia ~t154. We should also finally kill Krill/OT4E next turn.


Demos, power and GPN .

[Fintourist]

The big pic has not really changed since my last post, but let's anyways spam a bit while waiting for the new turn.

Below are the current city counts for the top 8 civs per score. I guess these are the 8 civs that have kind of survived the game so far with some kind of relevancy and the rest a decent bit more backward. Naufragar belonged to this group, but the latest events have taken its toll for him.. 

Mack - 32
TBS - 33
Us - 28
Pindi+Lewwyn - 22
Xenu - 23
BGN (Gav) - 19
dtay - 25
Commodore - 23

During the past turns, mack and TBS have added couple of cities while our next waves comes soon and we should also be at 32 cities in three turns. Once again city count is only one thing and it makes us seem stronger than we are at the moment. We are still basically just operating with our 10 original core cities + 2 OT4E cities that have become productive. All the rest are still at low sizes or filler-quality cities. At least mack is certainly rocking a set of 20+ solid cities as captured core cities beat new astro plants quite handily.

So yeah, we are trailing mackoti by a fair amount, but TBH I'm not exactly sure how big the gap is. Meawhile we know from lately acquired graphs that TBS's economy/tech is pretty much as lackluster as ours. So as a summary I would say that (totally unexpected considering our T60 dogpile) we are within a shouting distance from 2nd place, but Mack with his Hindu shrine and developed cities is potentially a runaway that we can't really stop from our corner. But who knows, if mack is struggling with GNP as well, this might become a really long game as techs are getting more and more expensive..

Anyways, we are happy with our current 10-turn set of peace with Toku and enjoying our 2nd MoM-powered Golden Age (Mercantilism swap incoming!). As written earlier, this should give us the required time to focus on Astro expansion and execution of our GPP plans while not forgetting the need for a military force required for the next phase in the game. 

As a final note, everything becomes more and more fragile though as the game becomes global and we become more and more stretched.

[Old Harry]

Turn 152

Banking will complete this turn, we had to switch to a lot of wealth builds to be sure.


In Australia we hope the axes attack Yuri's Revenge rather than chasing the settler heading to cow/silk. Although if the settler has to retreat to Yuri then it can set off into the middle of the island and claim more valuable territory, so I'm not entirely sure that would be terrible.


We'll be chaining a bunch of units up to help out next turn (landing t154).


Nothing else interesting happened except some wrangling over food and hammers. And we chickened out of killing Krill this turn. Maybe tomorrow?

Demos and power.

[Krill]

GG

[Fintourist]

GG OT4E and thanks Krill for covering. Sorry that we took such a while for the last city.

[Hitru]

GG OT4E, you gave us hard time even in 3 vs 1 dogpile with those shock numids. And indeed sorry about us taking so long with Tacape!