[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[Woden]

Turn 6-Vikings
Capital grow to size 2 and warrior continues up the coast...
   

Sub, Roland, TAD, and Kaiser all grew this turn, so have worked a 3 food tile.

Plan for warrior is to check out the little outcropping and then head back south, defogging more as he comes back to capital. My working hypothesis is that a city state might be up there, as it looks to be halfway between our starts. I don't see anything on settler-vision but we will see. Overall, it does look like we share an island.

[ljubljana]

Turn 7 - Phoenicia



Oh, yeah, of course working 3-food tiles means they'd have grown over the last interturn and not what I said earlier, whoops. Anyways, my capital hits size 2 and starts working the sheep. We'll get the turtles in two turns - I'll try to manage the production/beakers tradeoff such that we get Sailing and the builder at around the same time. The warrior's at 84 health, so I give it one more turn of healing before the second attack. We'll then time the third attack such that it'll drop the warrior just below 50 health, which can then be promote-healed without it ever really entering the danger zone.

[The Black Sword]

Hey Woden, the lurkers feel you should explain the issue with tech shuffle in the tech thread and then you can come to an agreement with the other players. If you guys want us to make the call we are so far unanimous for banning it. But it will need to be explained to the others anyway so they know not to do it and then you might as well decide yourselves. I don't see how it helps/hinders any team in particular so you should be fine to discuss it without bias.

[Woden]

Turn 7-Woden

Bingo! Blue city state borders spotted...
   

Will meet them next turn. Best guess is there is probably another one off the other coast between us somewhere, or at least if I was making the map, that is where I would place them. Then a few between the team islands.

[ljubljana]

That's a great find, especially since we know Mysticism is next on the civics tree - if I'm the first to contact the CS on the opposite coast, we should be able to both get the boosts from both of these at an early date. That definitely motivates sending my first warrior down the coast as soon as it finishes up with the camp, and might also support sending warrior 2 over to the camp to speed that up.

[ljubljana]

Turn 8 - Phoenicia



Attack with the warrior, who is now at 68 health. I think I'll heal next turn then attack, promote, and attack to finish clearing the camp on t12. That's not really late enough for bringing over the second warrior to make sense, so it'll just head S/SE I think, unless you have any other suggestions. Unfortunately, I forgot to screenshot everyone's scores this time, so the spreadsheet isn't quite up to date - sorry about that!

[Woden]

Turn 8

Move my warrior and meet Mitla...
   

They want me to boost masonry. I don't get an envoy but no other civs are influencing them. Did they remove the first to meet envoy? Although it means I don't get free science right away, I like the change. Removes some advantages for being lucky finding a city state right away and it makes buying the pearl tile more important next turn for an early pantheon.

Added: I think my warrior will turnaround and head south. Probably along the flat tile and then head west between the mountains by the floodplain tile. Your warrior can defog by you before heading along the western coast and I can defog a line west of the mountain ranges. There are 2 rivers I want to defog before my settler comes out. What do you think?

[ljubljana]

Turn 9 - Phoenicia



The western warrior heals, and the eastern one finishes and heads east along the coast. The capital starts on the builder, and works the turtles this turn to finish off AH. Ideally, we'll be able to finish Sailing on the same turn the builder completes for the fastest possible fishing boat hookups, so we waste as few beakers as possible on researches not on the Cothon path. One problem with this, though - the tile picker wants the marble next, and will take 12 turns to get it. We'll therefore probably have to choose between wasting as many as 12 more turns' worth of beakers on off-path research and buying the fish tile. Any thoughts? I'm inclined to favor the tile buy, even though I dislike that pretty strongly in general, because we can make up for lost gold later but can't easily offset lost expansion and ES due to late Cothons.

They want me to boost masonry. I don't get an envoy but no other civs are influencing them. Did they remove the first to meet envoy? Although it means I don't get free science right away, I like the change. Removes some advantages for being lucky finding a city state right away and it makes buying the pearl tile more important next turn for an early pantheon.

My quest for them is the Early Empire boost, which is eminently doable, though it'll be slowish due to builder first. As for missing the free envoy, I've seen this happen in single player a few times, and am not sure what the cause is... We would see in the city state diplo screen if they were influenced by "Unmet Player", right? If the devs did remove the free envoys, they would need to have done so very recently, since PBEM19 had them.

As for the pearl tile purchase, this is an interesting idea - do you think the math would work out such that you'd get there quickly enough to boost Mysticism, even though we know from the bug that it's our mandatory next research after CoL? It seems plausible to me, but I haven't run the numbers or anything. Moreover, I'm unfamiliar with team games in general, but doesn't you researching Mysticism boost the civic for me, or something like that? If so, you'd probably finish it about when I'd get within range of boosting it to completion, which would be really neat if we can pull it off.

Added: I think my warrior will turnaround and head south. Probably along the flat tile and then head west between the mountains by the floodplain tile. Your warrior can defog by you before heading along the western coast and I can defog a line west of the mountain ranges. There are 2 rivers I want to defog before my settler comes out. What do you think?

This seems like a reasonable plan. A few things we might want to think about, though - as you can see from my wide-angle screenshot, you got a barb scout up here between turns. That seems to seal my warrior's decision to head east first to clear the camp, which I can't abide this close to the capital at such an early date. Does it make sense for your warrior to head that way as well? I'd say it might, depending on whether it's better to split the gold and ES or dump it all into my Phoenicia, but I'm not sure which we want - I do think there's an argument for dumping extra ES into my civ, since I'll be horribly weak if I miss the Classical GA, but I'm open to splitting it too, of course.

In a similar vein, I still think there's likely a natural wonder between us in that inland area, both because of sub and roland's suspicious ES growths a few turns back and because, as a mapmaker, I'm not sure where else it'd make sense to place the NWs. We might want to discuss which of us we want to find it first, and the degree to which it makes sense to divert scouting to achieve such a preference, if we have one.

[Woden]

I should be able to get a pantheon and boost Mysticism before it wastes anything. As for knowing it is there, doesn't really matter because I would look to see what is next before setting policies anyways and always planned on buying the pearls as soon as I could. For Teams, if I finish something, you get the boost if it is un-boosted. It will take 13 turns to get a pantheon and I am pretty sure at my current rate, Mysticism will take longer to reach 60%. It will be close though. Will need to work the numbers.

For the barbs, according to the peeps at CivFanatics, camps always spawn 7 tiles from a city center. And I think there is a camp at the start for every player (7 tiles for their starting location). This means that barb scout is probably from the camp 7 tiles from my starting position and best guess is that it is west/northwest of my capital (probably where all those lines cross on your screenshot), which would put it right where I plan to head. The scout just went in the wrong direction and made it up there. It is possible that since a few players have 3 era points, somebody already killed a camp, so a new one appeared and is 7 tiles from Mitla but doubtful. I think there are limits to how close barb camps can be to each other. I am considering leaving the scout and look for the camp just because he will just retreat if I attack him. Maybe I take one shot at him though.

As for era points and GAs, I don't think either of use will have trouble getting a GA. I plan on getting 2 boats out ASAP and if you get a boat out, there is 4 points each. Then we sail in different directions, we can probably meet everybody and circumnavigate the world before the era ends and that should give us plenty of points. My first boat will probably look for passage east and second boat will head south and then west. Your boat can head probably west since it looks open to you and we can meet at the other side of the world.

As for thinking you are going to waste science going down the wrong path, you have mining and pottery you can dump beakers into with no waste. Neither can be boosted, so no bonus if you are in Free Inquiry. You should have plenty of time before finishing Sailing and those two to get 2 sea resources hooked up and find which path to take.

[ljubljana]

I should be able to get a pantheon and boost Mysticism before it wastes anything. As for knowing it is there, doesn't really matter because I would look to see what is next before setting policies anyways and always planned on buying the pearls as soon as I could. For Teams, if I finish something, you get the boost if it is un-boosted. It will take 13 turns to get a pantheon and I am pretty sure at my current rate, Mysticism will take longer to reach 60%. It will be close though. Will need to work the numbers.

Got it, sounds like a plan to me! What are your thoughts on post-Mysticism civics researches? Since they're all in the third row, they're going to be very expensive, and both of us seem on track for pretty slow culture starts as well. My intuition is that one of us should research State Workforce unboosted to boost it for the other (since neither of us will have access to early districts), then we should build our GPs to get our second Pingala promotion in place ASAP to bootstrap the cost of the other civics. We can then head to EE to double-promote Pingala and because Colonization is the most impactful early policy expansion-wise. What do you think?

As for thinking you are going to waste science going down the wrong path, you have mining and pottery you can dump beakers into with no waste. Neither can be boosted, so no bonus if you are in Free Inquiry. You should have plenty of time before finishing Sailing and those two to get 2 sea resources hooked up and find which path to take.

It's true that dumping into mining and pottery avoids wasting "slingshot" science from the increased value of the boosts...but it does still waste gold and settler production by delaying Cothons, and may also waste beakers and blow our chance at 4 ES towards the Classical GA if it pushes the first Cothon past t61. That would be the argument for buying the fish tile - a 50g payment now might be worth accelerating cities 4+ by a few turns each. I'm not sure that's a strong argument, though, since that gold would otherwise go towards a crucial early Monument purchase, which a tile buy would delay by 8ish turns.

Turn 10 - Phoenicia



Horses right there at the capital, as expected. You have some visible at what was probably already your planned second city site, along the river W of Nidaros. The western warrior attacks, bringing it into promotion range, which I'll take next turn. The eastern warrior explores, and will hopefully manage to intercept that scout before it wanders into range of my capital.