[SPOILERS - El Grillo PB54] Staying home and stargazing

[El Grillo]

T53:



Like I mentioned in the tech thread, I must've played T51 and T52 because my Workboat was 1SW of the ivory on T50, so I must've moved W-NW, NW-N, NE-NE. Anyway, we also met scooter's Warrior, which means this continent is presumably scooter/naufragar/vanrober/Ruff, and the third continent has Elkad/gira/Cairo/Miguelito. I suppose I could still be completely wrong about my superdeath vs Mjmd hypothesis, but I expect to be meeting my southern neighbor soon with my fogbusting Warriors, so we'll see if I'm here with Mjmd and superdeath or with one of Cairo/Miguelito.



Ruff's Workboat has made it to Elkad's borders.



I went back and forth on this, but I decided to grit my teeth and meet my original EOT55 GLH date. There are a couple factors that make this slightly more palatable. Solar Eclipse has just enough food to not starve over 3t, Milky Way can grow to size 2 a turn earlier by taking the pig, and the hammers let us finish the build a turn earlier with exact hammers, which makes the 3rd-ring chop I've already committed to more justified, and gets us the benefits a turn earlier, not to mention the Settler and everything else down the line. I'm also slightly paranoid about losing out on the GLH after all this effort, which may just be residual unease from PB51 but is real nonetheless.

[NobleHelium]

You may wish to get checked for concussion symptoms if you have short term memory loss.

So it's time to ask, why were you sandboxing as India?

[El Grillo]

That's a scary thought, especially since I'm currently living on my own and working remotely...

It took me a minute to figure out what you meant by sandboxing as India, since that was one of the first civ picks I discarded during testing. If you mean the flag, color, and description in some of my sandbox screenshots from earlier, that's because I was messing around with a bunch of different picks and was lazy and just changed some of the XML tags for leader traits and civilization ID in the WBsave file, and not the whole entry.

[El Grillo]

T54:




Ugh, that's not ideal. I moved my Warrior 1SE instead of sacrificing it by moving 1S in the hopes of the barbarian moving anywhere except 1NE. I'm not entirely sure how the AI works in this situation but I don't think it's set to home in towards my borders, so hopefully it's a random roll with 20% for a bad outcome. If so, then that would be unfortunate. I decided to chop this forest 3S of the capital instead of the equivalent one 1N2E of it because there had been more barbarians sighted to the east than to the south. If the worst-case unfolds and the barbarian moves 1NE... I may have been grudgingly willing to pay some food to meet my deadline, but 60h? Yuck.

Even if we do manage to complete the chop safely, this Spear could still mess with my scheduled settling down here, unless I feel like giving the new guarded-Settler-always-beats-barbs mechanic a try. Copper for Axes is still a ways away, and while PRO Archers will have no trouble defending a city tile, they can't prevent pillaging.




And here are naufragar's borders.

[El Grillo]

T55:



Thank goodness, the barb did not move to threaten my chopping Worker. Settling those cities might still have to be delayed, but I'll take it. I may end up not whipping just yet and keeping the capital at size 5 so it can build some military for safety.



Fingers crossed, no coin-flip please.

[El Grillo]

T56:



I was a little nervous about the stirrings in the lurker thread, but we have ourselves a Great Lighthouse.

Now we need to decide how greedily we want to expand, and also how to deal with that stupid barb Spear (there's also a stack of two Warriors to the northeast). I was half-joking about leaning on the new guarded-Settler-gets-free-wins mechanic before, but upon further consideration that might just be the safest, quickest way to go about it, with Archers just a bit too slow to get to where they're needed. I'll run some Worldbuilder tests to see how that works in practice, but maybe I just lean into not having Granaries and keep the capital at size 5 working mines and 5-turning Settlers . 7 bonus hpt from IMP is hard to pass up when I don't have cottages and a Granary to regrow on.

EDIT:

The guarded-Settler mechanic seems to work as advertised, so I think we kind of hew to the original plan and whip the capital Settler next turn, which also lets us give a mine to Milky Way to finish its Warrior before it grows into unhappiness, whip North Star ASAP for a Monument, and then use the Settler/Warrior combo to kill the Spear and then settle horse/fish/ivory more or less on schedule for it to receive its Monument chop. By that time we'll have Archers on their way from the capital and the beginnings of a road network.



Demos indicate that we're not too critically far behind in foodhammers, though given we have 5 KTBs on Pottery, most people probably have their Granaries up and running already, which doesn't show up on the graphs yet.

I'm fairly confident top GNP is naufragar, whose Stonehenge just doubled to 16 culture per turn.

[civac2]

Congratulations for your oversized sign-post!

[El Grillo]

T56:



We uncovered naufragar's capital and Miguelito's culture and have to decide whether to head north or south next. It's a toss-up, but I think I'll have a better chance of meeting another player to the north.

Quiet turn otherwise, naufragar declared war on scooter but it's probably a Workboat scout like ours. We've reached EP equilibrium with Ruff and vanrober and I'm putting mine into scooter next.

[El Grillo]

T57:

More progress on the exploration front:






We not only met Mr. Cairo, but also achieved mechanical circumnavigation.




I originally took this screenshot to celebrate unlocking the achievement of meeting all of the other players in a Continents game first before my two immediate neighbors, but I ended up clicking through some of the combinations and saw that naufragar has killed one of scooter's units, if I'm remembering how this works correctly.




KTBs indicate that someone could be heading for Judaism soon, though I didn't check before meeting Cairo so it could be him or anyone else. Cairo does have Writing (I offered him Open Borders) so that makes it less likely it's him. No early religion for us then, and no one to try and get a spread from yet, maybe Elkad in a bit.

At home, I'm shuffling a bunch of Warriors around in anticipation of the Settler+Warrior bullfight against the Spear, since I want to be able to fogbust the site afterward so I'm not left vulnerable after settling the city. For the actual combat, I tested it and won consistently, though I'm aware it's not 100% foolproof. At these strength differentials though, it should be good enough. That will be as early as end of next turn, depending on if the Spear takes the bait (you need to be defending on a tile with a Settler to get the bonus).

Once we have these five cities established, I think that should give us a solid enough base to make a claim on the contested island. We'll see how that goes, with the emphasis on trying to keep things peaceful with Ruff, and then push to our east and try to claim the marble. I'd like to tech Calendar for the happiness and to try building Mausoleum again, just in time to make use of the GLH GPP for a Golden Age around right around T105. We could do something perhaps a bit more aggressive with Construction and HBR to try and push south or west with our Ballista Elephants, but unless things shake up I think I'd prefer to keep building Settlers for the east first.

[El Grillo]

T58-T60:

The turn pace has been blistering!



Our Warrior flawlessly dispatched the Spear and gained 4xp for its trouble, and I'm hoping the two barbarian Warriors attack as well. Then our Settler can lay his cheerleading baton down and go about his intended purpose, and I might even upgrade the Warrior for a woody2 Axe for the eastern frontier and try to get enough experience for Heroic Epic.



That's an awfully short distance between territories. I'm suddenly glad for contested island's existence, instead of having Ruff's capital 6 tiles away...

Some serious fighting is going on between naufragar and scooter. I've been keeping track of when people hook strategic resources, and naufragar had copper before I declared war for passage, and now he doesn't. His cities have also been whipped down to size 1, and scooter has a whopping 22 war weariness. I don't see any of scooter's territory so I don't know how reasonable this is from his perspective, this isn't just an opportunistic attack. We do know scooter moved on T0 instead of settling in place, so maybe he ended up closer to naufragar, and also lucked into getting a strategic resource inside his BFC instead of at 3rd ring, and figured Stonehenge would be an attractive prize.

While we're speculating, rival worst demographics have improved significantly so it doesn't look like superdeath managed to maintain his choke on Mjmd. Since I haven't technically met Mjmd, I don't even know if they are still at war. I'm not super worried because our city will be quite far from his, plus the whole PRO Archers thing, but the flatland horse/fish/ivory city with hills adjacent to it will want Walls and a decent garrison sooner rather than later.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention it at first, but we did meet superdeath on T58. He settled for the sheep second-ring, and his only culture source would be a Monument, so this is likely his second city. Fortunately there's nothing too blatantly placed strategically for us to fight over.




We're each putting 4 EP into each other.