[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[Krill]

Turn 061

That warrior loss is brutal. It's hard to overestimate the effects it will have: the expected changes to City4 alone are measured in lost turns of growth. I seriosly doubt I will get the granary at size 1 now. I suspect the loss over the course of the game would be hundreds of hammers, compounded from the lost food. I do have a plan though, but it's not a pretty one. I'll start at the bottom.




The new barb warrior that turned up is only going to be a problem if it beats the my warrior on a forest hill. If it does that I will likely want to ditch the game and get a sub, and I don't think that's unreasonable: The barb warrior has 3.2% chance of victory. OTOH, I did lose that 99% battle in PB42 with a chariot...

Realistically, if it beelines Owlthorpe it steps on the cow on T65. If it pushes WT, it steps on the grass farm on T67. In either case I expect the whipped axe I'm planning (more later) will deal with it.





Let's be brutal here: worst case scenario the warrior promotes to C1/Shock and beelines an empty city. If it wanders into the fog, fantastic, but I'm not that lucky. Note warrior5 is currently north of owlthorpe

If the barb moves SE T62, onto the plains tile, it leaves open the option of heading for either Owlthorpe or City4. If it moves east or south, then that alleviates some pressure, so SE is the main consideration. Whatever happens, I need to move warrior6 (the one completed in the capital) towards City4, and it reaches the city on T63.

T63 that would give the barb the option to move onto the grass forest hill, or the copper tile. So on T62 I'm moving both copper workers to farm the rice and move the warrior out of owlthorpe NE (obvious question: Why not move it onto the grass forest? Obvious answer: I would only have the warrior6 to hold the city, so I'm giving it up for a 50/50. Bad idea if the barb moves SE, I have to move warrior5 NE but not if it moves in other directions). If the barb moves onto the copper, I use both rice workers to road under warrior5 and move it into Owlthorpe along with warrior6 and try to clean up if the barb wins again.

Meanwhile, if the barb moves onto the grass hill, I can move both workers back and mine the copper on T63, and build an axe in Owlthorpe. T64 whip the axe, and the barb suddenly finds itself in a rough spot and I still have 2 units in Owlthorpe.

Does this solve all problems? No. I can't stop the barb pillaging the copper road, I can't stop it wandering past cities, I can't stop it wandering along hills all the way to the capital. And I'm really stretched if the southern barb beelines Owlthorpe whilst the northern barb beelines City4 and blocks the copper.

All because of a 9.9% loss.





The micro that involves worker whip T64 is what I'm going with, and to hell with teching Archery. I'm not sure how close to a eoT67 Maths I am now, as if I drop the slider to 90% Maths in 8 turns with 6 gold spare. Eot68 Maths is actually not an issue, it just delays teh Lighthouse chop a turn.





3 commerce > 1 food.





Because of the expected issues with the copper hook up, I expect this warrior to complete eot62. unless the northern barb camps the copper, I should be able to finish the mine T63 and then build an axe here. This completely fucks the road to the horse city as well: the worker whips are all going to hell in a hand basket. Maybe you thought the hundreds of hammers comment was hyperbole: it's not when you consider the decisions I have to make elsewhere, and the knock on effects on workers, tile improvements, delayed cities...as it is, if the barb warriors both beeline cities, I can't whip a worker here until T67.





Ha. Spelling mistake. Should be Wetheral, I'm going there fore a few nights week after next. The name felt right.

The original plan was rice this turn, copper for 3 turns, then improved rice for a turn (T65) and both forests would have been chopped in for the granary. That's gone to hell, but the benefit of Maths being right around the corner suggests I ought to reconsider this anyway.

Unless the northern barb beelines the copper, it would be hooked next turn. I expect it to move onto the plains hill though, so I'll move the workers around and keep open the option of the road under warrior5. I also don't want to finish the mine: I don't want the barb to pillage it, but it can't remove invested worker turns. Biggest risk is pillaging the copper road which would be annoying.

Worker1 is chopping the northern grass forest, and would complete T63. It is already on the tile, otherwise I would never have moved it. I toyed with an idea of teching archery and chopping an archer, but it's not worth it IMO. If the barb can plough through three warriors then I'm just giving the game up as a bad job. So on T63 I'll likely move to road the ivory. On T64, if the barb attacked and won (43% odds of victory), I'll either clean up with the remaining warrior (if 1 hit, 63%, if 2 hits, 89%, or more likely have my warrior bounce), then I chop the southern forest for an additional warrior. If that warrior dies and the city is razed, then I quit. It would be a 1 in 50,000 or higher chance of happening from the events of this turn (yet I suck at statistics so someone will probably tell me it's actually even more unlikly).

I can't plan worker micro that far in advance though, but if I can't hook the copper, and the southern barb beelines Owlthorpe, I'm just going to have to 2v1. Except I wouldn't have a second warrior to use, so I'd be totally screwed and would likely lose the cow pasture. Or possibly Owlthorpe to another low odds attack because I wouldn't even finish a second warrior unless I worked a bare plains hill, plains wine and the wheat.

See, if it was just 15 lost hammers it'd be fine...

I'm going to try and save both forests for after Maths. If I can do that, then I can probably salvage Wetheral. If I have to build the barracks off the back of the copper tile though, the city is worthless to me.





Barracks in Antium, and I have more pop and I believe more cities than TBW, so that's OK.





First things first: Crop yield is good. 4th out of 16, with cities at a low ebb of population is a solid place to be for T61. GNP is also interesting: There are 3 founded religions, Henge and Oracle down. I shouldn't be higher than 6th but there I am at 5th due to lake and seafood commerce (15 commerce, 12 of it through a library). It's neither here nor there really, but better to be 5th than 10th.

The MFG is dissappointing, OTOH I'm not working any mines. It's worth considering that around T73 Westminster should be at 18hpt or so and Wetheral ought to be at 8hpt, so I'm a good 15 turns behind first place IMO.

tl;dr for this turn: The RNG sucks huge giant donkey balls, and wait for the barb movements. If any more turn up I'm probably fucked.

[Krill]

Turn 062

Hot war: Borsche razed a 2MN city. Maybe we are the truly isolated player, ebcause our neighbours have to travel only one tile per turn over land rather than 2 tiles by sea.

This isn't a big turn. T63 is the big turn, were we see where the northern barb warrior moves to.




The barb promoted to C2, which helps the odds out a bit. Now attacking on flatland is a 50/50 (well, 51/49 in my favour) battle.





Thankfully teh southern barb did it's duty and died. 3 hits is around average, and my warrior will heal fast enough to deal with anything except an axe.

[Krill]

Turn 063

The barb moved onto the copper. Whilst there is the option to pillage the road, all that it causes is the following to occur on T65 rather than T64.




Potential Outcomes of Battle of Wetheral

Barb warrior, C2, 82hp v warrior, 25% city defence, 100hp:

Barb warrior wins: no hits taken: 0.73% and 82hp, 1 hit taken: 2.45% and 61hp, 2 hits taken: 4.8% and 40hp, 3 hits taken: 7.16% and 19hp. Barb loses (number of hits on my winner are irrelevant: 84.85%

Odds of follow up warrior winning agains barb a victorious barb warrior: 82hp: 39.48%, 61hp: 70.15%, 40hp: 93.22%, 19hp: 99.99%

Therefore the odds of the barb warrior surviving two warriors is 1.49%, and note I can also chop a further warrior next turn anyway. Assuming the barb warrior survived attacking the city and the counter by the warrior, it would be at a lowest of 6hp, but would promote heal before attacking, so it would be C2/shock and 53hp. Such an attack would have, between, 4.32% (assuming healed from lowest surviging hp) and 30% odds of victory (assuming it takes 1 hit, I attack and the warrior bounces, the barb promote heals to 75hp). If it attacks and has a flawless win, I would not attack but it would promote heal to 91hp and then it would have odds on the follow up attack anyway, but that is a 7 in 10,000 outcome for those two relevant battles and there would still be a further warrior to get through after that, and a fifth warrior from Owlthorpe).

The tl;dr is that if Wetheral were to be razed, it would be because of an act of god.

The absurd idea that the barb moves onto the rice just means I can slam three warriors into it on T64 for the cost of 2 worker turns (only need the two worker turns for a road for the newly constructed warrior7 in Owlthorpe). This should not happen. Either the road is pillaged or the city is attacked IIUC.

   Once they have entered your territory, they will consider the following options for their current turn:

• Pillage an improvement (50%)
  
• Attack somebody
  
• Depending on conditions A and B move to another tile to pillage or attack a city (or target a city)
  
• Patrol --> here they always prefer to move into unowned tiles (this is why they don't enter in the first place; if possible they will move out again; if they somehow get boxed in by cultural borders they might also "have to" enter your territory with this mission)
  

The worker micro is still up in the air. I'm becoming less certain I can get Maths eot67 unless I work a coastal tile at Westminster, but that delays the lighthouse so it makes more sense to just let it slip a turn. I'm toying with the idea of just mining the three grass hills east of Owlthorpe (after whipping a worker T64): Whipped T64, dump overflow T65, growth@3 eot67, growth@4 eot70; or even grow straight to size 5 and stagger growth to size 6 on a worker (the whip must be the more efficient options, but I keep on having a nagging feeling that teh food surplus is that low it just might not be). It makes sense if the barb warrior manages to kill a couple of warriors because I just do not have the workforce to settle the horse city, or the units to defend it and would instead need to look at settling somewhere different with the settler from WT.





Depending on what the worker micro looks like, I can see being forced to settle the double crab/sheep plains hill tile soon. This isn't the worst idea in the world: I can use overflow dumps from WT to build a single workboat, and I can direct workers down here if I whip Owlthorpe for a few workers as I don't need any miliary to hold this area; settling a city actually frees up units. I think a library double chop might even be faster than a granary double chop TBH, and then I'd use that crab city to settle the rest of the area.

Note: silver city is worth founding for the happy and to bleed off food once WT hits a happy limit, but I think it's still better to found for new food resources and just dump the excess food from WT into food hammer units if I am not expanding at an economic limit (ie not crashing the economy, and I have worker turns I can't use to expand in other directions due to barb pressure). So if I have the worker turns and excess food to put into food hammer units rather than vertical growth, settle for food to power horizontal growth. This is a gut feeling, but I can't understand why I think it's right to do this when I've been talking about settling the silver city so much. Maybe it's the realization that the silver happy isn't that critical and it can wait 10 turns? I dunno.





New world map. I still have no clue about the dot map despite looking at it for the past hour.





So...top food dropped. 2MN lost a city, so it could be him? EXP/PRO Ethiopia running light military wouldn't be unexpected, and it also wouldn't be unexpected to be top food really. I've also gone up to third in land area. Unfortunately I know I was 4th on T61 after I settled Wetheral, and I was 12th on T60, so this doesn't really confirm anything other than 2MN was ranked second or third, and now he isn't (first place has increased, I suppose he could have been first and second or third place increase to above 61k land right onto 62k land...

And OH settled another city. Jesus. Seven cities? Did he get the land of milk and honey or something?

[Krill]

I have a fear. It's not that the barb warrior will win: I expect it to pillage this turn and attack and die next turn (5% fort doesn't really do anything, drops the barbs odds to 13.5% from 15.15%). I fear that it will respawn as an axe immediately outside my borders and I'll have no response to it. Facing axes without horses, stuck on flatland? Now that is a real nightmare that can only be solved with hammers I don't have.

[AutomatedTeller]

out of curiosity - why do barbs spawn axes and spears early? I thought they only spawned them when they had copper and the tech. Did you make a change in the mod?

[Krill]

out of curiosity - why do barbs spawn axes and spears early?   I thought they only spawned them when they had copper and the tech.   Did you make a change in the mod?

Barb axes and spears spawn only once the barbs have researched BW (and Hunting for spears), but barb research is retarded by the lack of a palace. The barbs get a research bonus for each tech that any player knows, and the more players that know a tech, the faster they research that tech IIUC. I can't find any references for this any more though, so I could be misremembering it. It does explain why barbs field archers so much more in SP games but seem to skip them entirely in PBs. REsources themselves have nothing to do with the units that get spawned.

Part of hte issue is that you can never be sure when a new unit type will be spawned (when a unit is spawned is easy: every time the number of barb units falls below a limit defined by the DanF thread linked above, and there is a valid place for it to spawn. That's why I'm fogbusting: to make sure that any that do spawn start a long way away).

FWIW, the barb warrior did it's duty and died, and it turns out it had another -25% city attack penalty so it had 9% odds of victory. Update to come later.

[Krill]

Turn 064

The barb died.





This makes things easier. Please ntoe the population numbers





Again again note the population numbers. I've just whipped 7 out of 15 population, I wonder what the other players make of that.

I improved the copper: it's a 6 yield tile and I need the hammers to get the granary down in Wetheral. Should have been completed T62, but whatever. Rice hooked T66 (worked T67), ivory hooked T68. I could have swapped these around but I want the workers on the road network. Worker4 (whipped in capital) donates a single worker turn to improving the ivory T65 because I don't want the finish the grass forest chop for hte capital until T69.

I'm sure you'll note the costs have increased by 50% and question when Maths will actually be researched.





The costs increased because I moved a single unit outside my borders (1gpt)(and unit costs increased by 2gpt. THe unit costs increased because I whipped population and therefore have a lower support limit, this should only be temporary as I put 4 pop back up over the next 3 turns (1/1/2/1/1/2 are pop growth over next 6 turns, have fun figuring out which city is which).

Maths is at 214 beakers. By my calculations I should still finish Maths eot68 with about 4-5 beakers spare, so it's only the costs I have to worry about. I only need to save one gold to manage that with the current amount saved.

Warrior5 in Wetheral is healing and returns to Westminster. The two warriors pushing back into the fog are to barb-bust. I hate pushing into fog with one move units and no idea what is ahead.





I know I'm posting the same screenshot every turn, but in this instance I'm actually thinking move about that double crap/sheep spot some more. Partly because of how it fits with teh silver city (it's mostly the same road), and that it would allow me to move the fogbusters to the hills 2W and 1E of the forest-wheat, and barb bust all possible galley spawning locations on my side of the barb-busting net. It's not an immeidately necessary bonuis, but given I would need two galleys to safely defend against a barb galley, it's not much of a cost differential compared to a settler and some worker turns.

Also, that city gets up to +10fpt with a border pop, granary and lighthouse, and the four forests give two of those, and the innate hammers from the city tile means it's just a 1 pop whip for the third item. So ignoring the worker turns for a road (trade connection is inherent as coastal) that's 20 worker turns and 60 hammers worth of work boats for a city that will settle to rest of it's own region.

I need to return to the worker allocation. I can't ignore settling that city.





Quick run through: Chop T69, Lighthouse eot69, growth@5 eot70 (it's three turn growth regardless of what I do). Growth@6 eot72, Galley eot73 with second chop, and I think I can rig it with enough overflow to get settler eot78 for the island, and unless the barbs of horrific, it can maintain size 7 and 5 turn settlers from T78 anyway. I'm pretty sure that it's 2 turn growth to size 7 as well (and then growth to size 8 is dependant on the amount of hills worked anyway).

Because of the variance between number of coastal tiles worked and the number of hills, I have no idea of what tech timings are. I'm going to need enough gold to manage 10, maybe 12 turns of max research so I'll be saving for a while.





Settler whip T70, and T76? If so, can I get the roads in place to settle the double crab location T79? 9 worker turns...actually. Yes, I can. But at a cost to Westminster only having mines on T69, T71 and T73, which would delay it's own settler. And IF the settler were delayed, it doesn't actually matter: it's the forest chops that really matter and they could not occur before T80 (and I'd probably want to play around with overflow due to needing a single work boat provided (it can build the second by itself).

So yeah, I could definitely have the double crab city settled, with a library or granary built eot80 working an improved crab. Those numbers can be crunched another day.





Just worker whips for the horse city, unless an axe turns up in which case it's axe whips for defense of the realm.

I'm not sure of this, but I'm thinking second worker whip T69. Growth on the axe to keep it one pop whippable for that emergency. The library is back to being a pipe dream, as is getting cottages down. Worker attention will come from other sources IMO, but even then that doesn't come quick enough so probably going to be forced to whip a third worker but that leaves the city at size 2 just when I need to give the wheat over to Westminster.

The micro is pretty horrific, actually. I'm going to have to look at this over the next few days. Once the horse city is down and held securely things get a lot easier, but even if everything goes perfectly I could not settle it before T73. The next 10 turns are going to be rather worrisome for me.





So this might sound a bit weird, but Wetheral has such low food output that the barb hasn't slowed down it's growth curve much at all. There are no irrigatable tiles before Civil Service, so +4fpt is the best it will have.

Growth@2 eot69, growth@3 eot72, growth@4 eot77, ensure overflow 6 hammers eot77, build a worker, and whip T80. I calculate 56 hammers are produced, including overflow from the granary by eot77 so it's just about swapping between builds to ensure maximum overflow from an axe or spear eot77 to ensure a worker gets to 30/60 in 2 turns (12fhpt output at size 4).

It might sound even more bizarre, but it's harder to improve tiles for a slow growing city than a fast growing city: workers improving tiles too fast is inefficient, so I'll keep on sending workers somewhere else and then need to bring them back as the city grows. Fast growing cities just need more workers throwing at them. After this worker whip, I reckon it will have to do the same again (dump overflow into a wroker, regrow and 1 pop whip) and at that point be allowed to grow onto cottages whilst building military very slowly. Wetherall is probably going to be subserviant to owlthorpe: if in doubt, I'll throw resources at Owlthorpe as it can grow faster.





Even after whipping 7 pop (that's more than 2MN must have lost) I'm still only 10th in crop yield, makes me wonder for those other 6 players).

[Krill]

I think I say this every game: the barbs are worse opponents than most players.

EDIT: Also, worth mentioning in passing that superdeath should probably be banned from playing in any more games until he ded lurks a vet.

[Krill]

Turn 065 preview

This is what I mean. The warrior move from WT is starting to seem somewhat prescient, but not the food surplus: if I don't put a garrison back in, I will need to put two turns into the settler now, spend 2 turns growing and only one turn carrying an unhappy face before a triple whip at size 6 on T70 as planned, at the cost of 3 food and 1 production compared to previous plans.

And superdeath just build the sodding GLH as Boudica of America. WTF.

[Hollybombay]

Who did you expect to get it?