[PB56] NobleHelium Tells It Like It Is

[NobleHelium]

They have a granary in their second city (Anise) next to the Henge city. I was surprised to see it, I don't think I've ever built a granary this early while not being EXP.

Also the fact that they have one in their second city may also mean that they built one in the capital as well, if there was a 2-whip there.

As someone who also tends to build granaries very early, I'm curious why you do not build them early

It looks like I missed this question. It's pretty simple really, if you are not EXP it tends to be better to build a settler that early in the game compared to a granary. I assume you have also seen my comments on granaries in another thread, which I won't repeat here for spoiler reasons.

[NobleHelium]

I meant, what will your borders in other directions look like? What border cities are you aiming for?

I'm glad you asked novice!  Because it's the perfect time to answer that question.

We played up to turn 73 yesterday.  The biggest recent domestic development was a bit of a settlement dispute with Amicalola in the north.




A few turns ago Amica had an axeman on the tile where the chariot currently is, and he actually fortified the axeman there briefly.  He had two workers on the roaded hill southwest of that, and it seemed apparent that he was planning to settle the hill that the axe was on.  However I was able to use the chariot to fork his axeman and the workers by being on the forest where Amica's settling party currently is.  We also had a chariot in Fireball to pin down the spearman in Anise so that it couldn't go cover the axe.  So he had to briefly retreat the axe and wait until he got another spear into Anise before he got all his units covered, and in that time we were able to settle Remand, which prevents him from settling on the hill.  He also declared war on us and asked for a treaty.  I thought about declining but given that I couldn't really do much once the second spear was brought up and I'm not inclined to go into another military buildup just yet, I accepted.  It did occur to me that he might use the treaty to settle a city uncontested, but he more or less has enough units to settle the city anyway even if we had remained at war or only agreed to a cease fire.  Maybe we could have delayed him by a turn or two, but I like having the 10 turns peace right now anyway.

Remand is a very nice city claiming deer, crab, wine, whale.  You can also see the horse is in the BFC but Amica actually settled 1W of the horse on the same turn after we played.  Nothing we can do about that, so we'll just have to live with it for now.  I know the quality of the cities would be clearer with resource bubbles but some of the resources are so densely packed that it would make the map very hard to see, so I've been mostly keeping them disabled.  Anyway, it's pretty clear that we'll have a big vertical border with Amica and we are unlikely to get more land north of Remand for the foreseeable future.  He will have a big wide open area to his north and somewhat to his west to settle.  Northwest of him is Ruff who is remarkably still at three cities, so Amica is benefiting greatly from his weak other neighbor.  Still though, we should be claiming a good amount more land than he is and we're also doing it much quicker.

To wrap up our discussion on Amica, he built the Oracle eot70 and took Monarchy on t71.  He has wines in his capital so it makes sense, plus Monarchy is like the other "default" choice for Oracle other than MC, since anyone with Priesthood can research Monarchy.  I assume he will get the prophet in 50 turns and build the Hindu shrine.  I don't know where he built the wonder - it may have been in his holy city which had two forests chopped a while ago, or he may have built it in his capital or in his border city with Ruff.  I'm not really able to tell how much culture the holy city is generating right now.




We just settled our future Moai city of Mulldrifter.  This is a crazy spot overlapping the three seafood at Counterspell but also claiming another fish on the far side plus the silver.  This will likely be far and away the best Moai city I have ever had.  We already have stone hooked of course so we will get started on it as soon as possible.

As for the south, Laz is finally getting around to settling the pig which is three tiles from his capital.  It is honestly preposterous that he has not settled it yet.  Getting pink dotted does not mean you should not settle good spots near your capital in favor of bad reach spots.

And in other foreign news, there have been an incredibly large number of declared wars all over the map, but for most of them it's basically impossible to tell if there was any fighting or close to fighting.  Certainly Ruff and vanrober were in a hot war for a long time but they have since agreed to peace.  However just last turn Jowy took a city from Gira!  This was a huge surprise and it actually briefly crashed our economy (down to 4 bpt net) because all our trade routes from Jowy disappeared when Gira's culture was removed. It was only for one turn because we founded Mulldrifter right after that.



This is the Jowy-Gira border.  I am fairly certain the city near the marble is Jowy's because Gira has Sailing and if the city were owned by him he would have marble, and he doesn't.  Jowy does not have Sailing so it's very possible that there is no trade route between his marble city and his capital.




civac has done very well expanding and I believe he has a city on the stone, because the stone was connected before the rice was farmed.  And it doesn't make sense to do that unless you are settling on the stone.  He has also greatly benefited from the fact that his nearest neighbors are Jowy who is about 15 tiles away from him and Cairo who is about 13-14 tiles away from him.  I will see about posting a bigger composite map soon.



GNP is hugely bloated due to us teching Writing.  Our economy is actually quite bad and we are only making 13 bpt.  We will grow back onto some secondary commerce tiles such as seafood very soon but we're also settling more cities very soon so I am not sure what the net effect is.  If the economy does crash I blame Serdoa telling me to build settlers in every city constantly.

[NobleHelium]

I checked the overlapped culture with Amica's holy city again and it's only 10% on t74. So I think Oracle is not in the city.

[Serdoa]

I really do tell him all the time that we need more settlers - or more military. At best both! And we obviously should have many more cottages going, already researched Currency and gotten our Calendar resources hooked up.  

But in all seriousness, we are doing pretty well I think, even though our economy is of course rather strained by all these cities - but not settling them seems wrong as well. And we had to fight for the land to be able to do so in the first place. On that note, I really have to do some map complaining:

1) We had El Grillo / AT, Amica, Gira and Laz as neighbors. Every single one is I think around 10-11 tiles from our capital. 
2) civac has 2 neighbors, both 14-15 tiles away. 

I understand that maps can not be perfectly symmetrical with this many players, I did some myself for games in the past. But this is still an incredible difference. The same goes for land quality as far as we can see, though in that regard we got somewhat lucky I believe. Though that luck had to be wrestled from the hands of our neighbors in the first place, so even that is somewhat debatable I believe. Obviously we cannot see the whole map yet, so my opinion on that might change. But even if that land is better to others in comparison, we got pretty shafted just with the neighbor-situation. We got lucky because El Grillo / AT did go for Stonehenge, allowing us to take them over, but even if just the last fight for his capital had gone wrong, we would be in a much worse position, having to keep him in his capital in check, diverting resources to that and also most likely making it impossible to plant our northernmost city. 
And that situation could have arisen by no fault of our own imo, because if he does not go for SH and has just one warrior more to protect his third city, we would not attack. What would mean that we would have settled all the land available to us by now already - if we even had gotten it at all - we might even have been stuck at 7 or 8 cities. As it is Laz is playing a rather weak game, but if he had settled faster and also better spots, he could have invalidated the spot we planted Explore on, potentially having us lose out on a city down there at all and making it a much harder border to defend. So in gist, I believe we played a rather exceptional game up to now and in normal circumstances (and without putting an hour and more every day into it) most players would be fucked with this start (and several of the others) in comparison to what civac got. 

I don't like to complain much about maps, I know the work one has to put in to make one and in most cases something still slips through and we players have a tendency to complain even about small stuff that in most cases was not really relevant for having a bad game. But in this case I really question how it is possible that such an obvious difference in available space and neighbor-situation has gone unnoticed. If it hasn't, I really don't get why it was not possible to move civac closer to his northern neighbor by like 3-4 tiles, move Jowy by 5-7 tiles and move Gira by 3-4 as well, spacing all players out much more evenly. Yeah, resources have to be reallocated, but that has to be done anyway with hand-crafted maps if they are even meant to be remotely balanced or even fair.

I probably sound rather harsh (I have a tendency to do in any case and that I am cynical isn't helping) so I want to say I am appreciative of anyone who puts in the work to provide maps for these games. I do hope that my words can be distilled down to -hopefully helpful - criticism in order to improve maps, be it in the process of creation for map-makers or for lurkers when reviewing these maps.

[Bobchillingworth]

Have you attempted Settler Scrying for the many seemingly unclaimed tiles you've revealed but which are currently fogged?

[NobleHelium]

No, I keep forgetting to do that. However I've come to realize that Gira/mackoti planted a city on the marble but did not have Masonry, which is why the resource did not appear in trade but appeared hooked up to us, since we have Masonry. And that is the city that Jowy took.

[novice]

I agree that spacing players somewhat equidistantly should be a minimum requirement for a hand crafted map, and the fact that it wasn’t done here is especially mystifying, as one would think it was the primary reason for using a donut map script in the first place.

I think you’ve played a great game, and helped by some combat luck and some luck with regards to what other players have done, you’re now in a great position. Which is fortunate for the game balance as a whole, I guess.

[NobleHelium]

UGH. Sorry, I mispressed B when I had a settler selected. Can I get a reload please?



You can reload to civac's logout or my login.

[NobleHelium]

Sorry, I just logged into the game again by accident. So only civac's logout is valid for the reload.

[Cornflakes]

Missettled a city, can I please get a reload?  Picture in my thread.  Really sorry about this.

Looks like a clear cut case, but I am not an admin for this game so unfortunately J can’t hit the necessary button.

But while I’m here I have a question, what was your tech path and what is your mid-term tech goal? Many of your screenshot are partial snips without the tech bar so I’m having a hard time reconstructing what you have already researched. And I see that you have Math slotted now. Is that targeted in preparation for Construction? Currency? Just for the chopping boost?