[Spoilers - AT PB56] Whipping unhappy faces until El Grillo's morale improves

[El Grillo]

Next turn we'll have the surrounding area defogged, and I'll update my sandbox and be sad about the forest slowing me down. We're jammed in nice and tightly against Amicalola and NobleHelium and the arc of the coast, so I'm basically hoping they decide to settle away from instead of towards me so I can claim a pocket of cities and develop peacefully.

[El Grillo]

T15:




I'll be pretty content if I get to settle these cities, have a peaceful border with Noble for the time being (helped by those peaks and the lack of food near the furs), and try to manage the friction with Amicalola. My proposed city will put pressure on him all game long as I accumulate more culture, which he's not going to like, and as funny as it would be in karmic sense, I would prefer not to die to a Chariot rush.

[El Grillo]

Found Lazteuq a bit further to the south, he has BFC stone too, wonderful. There's a bit of space along the coast due south but those damn peaks mean Noble has a much easier time reaching and defending that area.

[El Grillo]

Some idle speculation, because I haven't been putting enough effort into the actual game to say much of substance about it:

I've seen enough of the map now to feel confident in guessing that this is a donut map with some players starting on the outer coast and some on the inner coast. So far we've met one other player Lazteuq who started on the outer coast and three players in Amicalola, Noble, and gira who started on the inner coast.

Assuming that these are spaced evenly, with 12 players you'd expect to see four sets of 3 close neighbors like the situation with me, Amicalola, and Noble. However, we only have 11 players, so one quadrant of the map would be significantly less crowded than the other three. I remember superdeath was having difficulty with the balancing, and clearly he's done something with extra offshore islands and peaks to adjust the geographical borders, but unless the map is actually not a donut but a C-shape, I don't see how you can avoid having one or two players with neighbors 15+ tiles away in the empty quadrant, while the rest of us have neighbors more like 8-10 tiles away in the 3-player quadrants.

Not that I think this will really matter much to me, I'm just going to settle strategics ASAP and hope to settle my five cities before Amicalola and Noblehelium do the natural thing and split me down the middle, if they don't make the mistake of trying to kill each other first.

[AutomatedTeller]

I'd need the password Is it that you have no time or would you want to team up and maybe take turns later?

[El Grillo]

The password is ‘goodbye’. Thank you so much for subbing in. Perhaps I can contribute a bit in the future and I won’t spoil myself for now, but please feel free to take the civ in whatever direction you’d like.

I sadly never updated my sandbox after that forest growth, so we’re quite slow coming out of the opening with a late second city, such that we could know where to settle for copper.

[AutomatedTeller]

well, tarkeel pink dotted us:

[AutomatedTeller]

found next turn - I'll leave his worker alone. No point in pissing off someone when you have just a warrior. The plant will piss him off enough, but he did the pinkdotting.

Worker will be 2 pop whipped next turn, with 29 overflow. 15 will go into a quecha, the next 14 into the next settler. Will grow to size 4 and whip the next settler, which will go to the copper.

Worker will chop, then move to the copper to road/mine. 3rd city will share the corn - cap will regrow on quechas.

[AutomatedTeller]

Founded SoLong (might as well keep the naming scheme, after all). Working the mined stone and chopping. Stonehenge will overwhelm that city and make it either flip or give me easy 1st turn access to it. It's 9 turns, working the stone and getting 2 chops.

2 pop whipped the worker.

I think I might still put the next city on that horse - I normally don't like putting a city on a strategic resource, but I need to get the copper online, so I think I need to do it. Plus, I may need tjhe 2nd quecha up to defend SoLong, since this is going to upset Tarkeel.

[AutomatedTeller]

I ended up overflowing directly into the settler. Why? Well, it was 44 hammers, so I would have lost 14 (I think to gold, which is ok) because if I built a quecha, that can only overflow 15.

Another reason, as I think about it, to put the settler on the horse is that I can then make a chariot and maybe capture Tarkeel's city if he doesn't have a spear in it. I mean, no big deal if he has a spear or an archer, but I could conceivably come out of nowhere and take it.