[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Oh, and we have a builder coming in next turn - what to do with it? I don’t know if scouting with it is the right long-term plan, but I am leaning towards saving the third charge for the moment, just in case we need it to eureka a tech on the Cothon path and can’t get a second builder out in time. If you think it makes more sense to just pasture the horse now and accept the consequences though, I could be swayed towards doing that as well.

[Woden]

Turn 15-Woden
Start turn off with...
   

For policies, I slot God King and Discipline. Units move and I find...
   

Not much of significance. Slinger finds a 2nd Marble, which makes the coastal, south of capital more viable. Next turn, warrior should get a good look at what is around the other 2nd city location. I am leaning towards this spot unless the coast jogs back east, then might move it a tile or 2 west. Slinger is going to head west now to see if I can get the boost to archery when I find the barb camp. I think my best guess is that it is located a couple of tiles south of my warrior. If so, I will have to take it out fairly soon, since it would be right next to the horses.

[Woden]

Oh, and we have a builder coming in next turn - what to do with it? I don’t know if scouting with it is the right long-term plan, but I am leaning towards saving the third charge for the moment, just in case we need it to eureka a tech on the Cothon path and can’t get a second builder out in time. If you think it makes more sense to just pasture the horse now and accept the consequences though, I could be swayed towards doing that as well.

I would hook up the horses or sheep, to get a 2/3 tile online. I don't see a need to keep it around. What are you planning on building after the builder? A settler is probably best and the extra production will help.

[ljubljana]

After the builder, my plan is to build a settler and then either another builder or a boat, probably the former since it can double as a scout by embarking. The second city will probably also need to go builder first, since there's no city site anywhere near me that doesn't require significant builder labor to be at all viable. The other thing we're going to need soon and for which it might be worth delaying one of those boats/builders (imo) is a monument, as we're looking at a very slow culture start as of now and we'll be stuck in the economic doldrums until we can get a double-promoted Pingala online in the capital, which will take forever at 3ish cpt.

The reason to delay building the pasture would be to scout on the ocean and to wait and see what techs we'll need to eureka on the way to Cothons - if one of these is Masonry or Irrigation, we could end up needing to use its last charge on a eureka before we'd have time to get another builder out. That said, I guess there aren't really that many scenarios where we wouldn't be able to dump beakers somewhere while we wait for the second builder, so maybe that's not actually worth it over extra production now from the horse pasture.

[Woden]

Turn 16-Vikings
Found the barb camp...
   

I am going to heal the warrior before engaging the camp, which will also give my slinger some time to get over to it. The city location by the camp is looking more like the better of the 2 sites. A little more production than the other site.

[ljubljana]

Woden, question for you before I submit my turn. Here is the situation with the barb scout:



I'm fairly confident from my SP games that this scout, since it's in non-aggressive mode and is trying to head back to its camp, is programmed not to capture the builder if we pasture the horse this turn. Moreover, even if I turned out to be wrong about this, I should be able to recapture it very quickly with two warriors closing in. Therefore, if this were a non-teamer PBEM, I'd pasture the horses now, especially since it saves a turn on the settler to do it now but won't if we wait even one turn. What do you think, though? Do you have experience that suggests that the builder might in fact get captured if I do that?

[Woden]

I'm fairly confident from my SP games that this scout, since it's in non-aggressive mode and is trying to head back to its camp, is programmed not to capture the builder if we pasture the horse this turn. Moreover, even if I turned out to be wrong about this, I should be able to recapture it very quickly with two warriors closing in. Therefore, if this were a non-teamer PBEM, I'd pasture the horses now, especially since it saves a turn on the settler to do it now but won't if we wait even one turn. What do you think, though? Do you have experience that suggests that the builder might in fact get captured if I do that?

That, I am not sure. It should ignore the builder and return to the camp but not sure since I believe camps tend to be programmed to find certain cities (the one they spawn 7 tiles from) and attack those. So, not sure if it will follow a certain line of programming in this case. If you think you can risk it, go for it but you might be chasing your builder around for a few turns.

[ljubljana]

Turn 17 - Phoenicia

Well, I went for it...only to discover that, for some reason, doing so used up both of my builder's movement points and didn't let me build the pasture! What the heck? It's a flatground plains horse, so I have no idea what movement rule I've managed to run afoul of here...



As you can see, I've also put together a wildly ambitious pinmap. Here are some comments:

• Much of the specifics of the pinmap was dictated by the city 2 location, which unfortunately looks like the only viable spot that doesn't require a trade route or a ton of tile buying to get rolling. That spot locks us out of the northern coast completely, though, which I of course don't love even though a city up there would be pretty weak and probably a lower priority than any of the other pinned sites. Moving the city to the SW to free up the northern coast has its own problems, though, substantially weakening the first ring tiles while locking us out of getting both a city 4 on the coast and a city 7 on the river. Not sure what the right play is here...
  
• I might also move the GP 1E so that city 2 can build it with only one tile buy, and so that we waste a forest with this city's campus (which can at least be chopped) rather than a hill. That does give up an adjacency on one of the campuses, but could be worth doing anyways. At any rate, I'm a little unhappy with the number of high-production tiles that this GP cluster wastes...but I don't see much of an alternative, since boosting campuses seems like a much stronger use of the GP than on IZs or Cothons (especially since the latter especially will be very hard to cluster around a GP) and most of the cities in this area don't really have strong alternative campus sites to consider anyways.
  
• City 3 requires the first trade route, and probably shouldn't be settled until we have a trader ready to go. It does also want to be founded early though, to get the second horse tile in play as well as the free beakers from the cluster of mercury.
  
• City 7 may just as well be one of your cities - I don't think that would invalidate the IZ adjacency math. Since this river valley area is roughly equidistant to the two of us, we're probably going to want to think about collaborating on the aqueducts/IZs here regardless of the specifics of which pinmap we ultimately settle on.
  
• If we do go with a map like this, the IZs especially make Machu Picchu look pretty worthwhile in the midgame, which would boost fully four of them to +7 .
  

[ljubljana]

I guess there is one other option for the second city, which is to move the city 5 location 1 SE and use that in an attempt to save the northern coast. That might look something like this:



This doesn't actually buy us an extra city location due to crowding in the south, though it does save us a bit of extra space by moving city 7 westward. The main issue, though, is that it uses the mercury area much less efficiently (the one city there in this map is worse than either of the cities there in the other map), and I'm not sure the north coast city that we'd get in exchange is strong enough to make up for that...

[ljubljana]

Yeah, here we go:

"Civilian units like Settlers, Builders, and Great People will lose all remaining Movement upon entering a zone of control and cannot perform any other actions, even if the tile they enter is occupied by a friendly military unit."

That's quite a gotcha - I have no idea why it was decided that civilian units needed to be unintuitively special-cased like that. Well, I sure have a lot of egg on my face - hopefully I'll escape the scout's karmic retribution here and not end up feeling any dumber than I already do .