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[PB61 - Spoiler] bell's uncreatively named spoiler thread
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(July 27th, 2021, 00:46)Tarkeel Wrote:(July 26th, 2021, 20:09)bellarch Wrote: Hmm, now I'm wondering -- if Mongolia dies, do we get to see their bar graphs even if we never put any EP towards them? I would be a bit curious. Huh, I thought there was a button you could click to show dead civs. Maybe that's only at the end of the game, or it's another mod I tried at one point or something.
So I woke up this morning to a new turn . . . and this massive Khmer power spike!
 That's a spike of 12K -- judging by city sizes, JackRB whipped an axe and two chariots last turn and is probably overflowing into another axe this turn! He's most likely coming for us. Fortunately, we've prepared for this ahead of time. Here's my defense plan:  (n.b.: I renamed a Quechua, pictured in this screenshot, to let Jack know we knew he was coming before Mjmd told me that that's not allowed. Oops. I have changed it back already; mods can feel free to confirm and change it didn't stick for some reason.) So what I have is: - Spear whipped at Foramen. Axe will be ready to whip in 2 turns, so if JackRB is slow about things we can have it ready when he attacks - Axe building at Wolof and Wolof on copper for the turn so we have enough hammers invested to whip for one if necessary. Unfortunately means we can't work the gems mine this turn (and delays us by a turn on Poly)  - Ater building an axe for a turn so it can be whipped for one next turn if necessary - Wolof's Quechua moving to Foramen I think this should be enough to stop any attack that comes for us. The main issue is that we're uniquely vulnerable for the next 7 turns because the copper isn't within Wolof's borders -- if we lose Foramen we can only build quechuas until Wolof's borders pop. So I prepared by making sure we could whip additional axes just in case.
Short summary:
-Bell learned a lesson about taking time at beginning of turns when a barb warrior showed up from NW. Moved to a flatland tile and barb won its 36% battle at high health and pillaged our forested deer (that poor deer). There is now a spear also incoming that way, but Bell has an axe out next turn so no worries. But heh at least learned the lesson this way vs losing 2nd city to a SD warrior rush....... -We both learned a lesson about being specific. We were talking about "southern" city site and Bell thought SW and I thought SE  . 5th city was therefore delayed, but should settle 2 cities turn 64.- Good news: have terraces up everywhere raising our effective food. Even after multiple whips still 3rd in food as of last time I looked. (July 31st, 2021, 02:50)Tarkeel Wrote: How is your expansion coming along? Any blood for the lurkers yet? Sorry, I've been a bit busy. The short version is that nothing much is happening. We do have two settlers out for the southeast and southwest but they haven't founded or anything. The Khmer power spike we were worried about just turned out to be units for dealing with barbs and guarding newly settled cities. They don't even have anything but a warrior guarding the border city! (which we know because Foramen is an absurdly good defensive spot, better than either Mjmd or I thought it was; I'll have to highlight just how nice it is now that borders have popped). I should put together a post talking about our terrace building process - it's the main reason to play Inca, after all! - so I'll have to do that next update; expect it either later today or tomorrow. Though I'm not sure I took all the pictures I should have for that . . . oh well. But yeah, nothing much is going on quite yet to be honest.
I don't really have time to do a full post right now, but let's do a quick overview of where we are.
First, we founded two cities this turn! The way that we were paused while moving settlers is part of what made it awkward to do an update earlier. We founded Satus (though I may decide to change the name) in a spot that will pick up the southern gems and cow, and Blessed Isle on the hill tile on the eastern strait.   Of particular note here is JackRB's axe near Satus. Theoretically, JackRB could move to attack the city; he'd be rolling the dice to get lucky on a 32% chance (attacking with a 10% fortify bonus -- or across the river, but that's much worse, about 23% odds). I think he's at least considering it due to the fact that (a) he hasn't moved (b) for perhaps the first time ever, Superdeath has logged in to take a look  . Just in case, I have an axe and a spear moving to reinforce the city -- though they won't be able to reach it before JackRB gets a chance to attack, unfortunately.In any case, both of those cities should be good border locations, and strong contributors in the long-run. Blessed Isle will have a huge amount of food and commerce tiles once we build a Lighthouse there, and once we build Moai in the city it'll also become a strong production city. In the medium term, it'll be producing most of our military as it 2-pop whips axes and spears into Moai hammers. Satus is a slower growth city, but it'll be able to work cows and gems as soon as the borders pop, and once we clear all that jungle it has a ton of tiles for cottages and such. As for research, we're currently on Monotheism. Basically, we were beaten to Poly by a single turn  so Mjmd and I talked it over and decided that we would probably have too much competition to have a reasonable shot at the Oracle. (And sure enough, someone researched Priesthood in the interim!) So we've headed to Monotheism to make sure that we grab a religion. Mono also gives us access to Organized Religion, which will be great for building missionaries and pushing infrastructure anyway, so it's not a bad direction. After we grab Mono, we'll be finally headed to AH, hoping to locate and improve horses and hopefully pasturize the cows at Satus. Gotta cash in those kbts! Then we'll probably do Sailing and then Writing. Here's the full tech situation: The northern front was a bit busy with a barb invasion, but it's under control now. Unfortunately the forest deer at Ater was pillaged, but we've just put the camp back up. Those workers will then be working to road north to our seventh city location, a northern tundra hill spot with a LOT of food and a source of marble.   I'll have some more stuff posted later in the day, but this is a quick overview of where we are right now.
Oops, didn't manage to find time to finish my overview post yesterday. So let's do that now.
First, let's take a look at our cities.  Ater is basically what it was as of last overview: a high-food suited for whipping workers and settlers to hasten our development. However, that's now changing. Since we discovered Pottery, we built two cottages between Ater and Wolof and have been working them every turn, building our commerce potential. Ater's now about to whip its last worker and then transition to working cottages full-time. We've currently got three workers in the area, and while they're currently roading to our seventh city location in the northeast, they'll be ready to start cottaging Ater as soon as it's linked into our defensive network. Sometime soon we'll be picking up writing, and Ater will be our first library spot.  Thalassina is likely to become our chief worker/settler pump in the near future. It's got a ton of food but only one grassland tile it doesn't share with Ater, so it's well-suited for whipping out units regularly or just slow-building workers.  Wolof is another commerce city. We want to whip one more worker there, but then it'll be invested in working a ton of cottages on all that grassland. Eventually we'll want to build a library there, but it'll take some time for us to be ready to do that.  Foramen is the most consistent production city in the empire, able to build units in five turns with at just size 2. That's a good thing for a fortress city! We mostly want to continue pushing production there, I think, but we may also want to throw down some cottages at some point. I'm debating when to chop the forests; we want to do it eventually so as to not provide cover to invading units, but we also would like to save those to maybe use for a wonder at some point.  Of further note is that Foramen is just about the best defensive fortress city we could have asked for. Stonehenge is coming in quite useful here, allowing Foramen to pop its borders to enclose a western hill tile that gives us visibility on all the area around Waterdream Warm, JackRB's 3rd city. Furthermore, the mountain to the northwest of Foramen's BFC allows it to see any surprise attacks that could be coming from the north. We'll further gain visibility to the southwest from a hill tile once the jungle tiles to the south have been chopped, giving us advance warning of any possible surprise attack JackRB might decide to launch. The added visibility has been very useful for us, allowing us to safely leave Foramen without a garrison while moving units around for barb defense. We will want to keep a garrison there soon, though -- JackRB has just discovered writing and so I expect Waterdream Warm to pop its borders shortly.  Satus is one of our two newest cities, founded in the southern jungle to claim cows and gems. Note that we already farmed a tile to the northeast, which we had when the city was founded -- Satus (and the southern jungle in general) doesn't have a huge amount of food, and so a starting farm to grow faster is very helpful. We'll want to chop out the terrace soon, but otherwise we're just waiting for it to pop borders so we can improve the gems and cows. Satus will be slow to get going, but it should be a very good city in the long run.  You can also see that we're moving to reinforce Satus -- there's already an axe on defense in the location, and we're moving a spear and (eventually) another axe that way as well. Satus is the most vulnerable city in the empire at the moment, sitting right next to Mongolia, Khmer, and barb spawning grounds! We need some units there to defend it against any and all possible attacks, and to protect our workers while they improve the city.  Blessed Isle is our other new city, founded on a hill tile on the eastern strait. As I think I've said before, this is our eventual Moai city and a defensive fortress against Rome. We've already chopped a forest to build the terrace, and we'll probably be doing the rest via natural production -- saving our whips for the lighthouse and units to overflow into Moai. This city will also take awhile to get going, but I'm sure it'll become a core contributor once we get a lighthouse there. At the moment, our core focus is producing units at Thalassina via whip overflow to defend at the new city.  Here's a closer look at the eastern border region. There's ultimately not too much going on here; Rome doesn't appear to have settled the area (besides Copper City to the north), so this looks like a pretty secure border right now. We will not be expanding east of Blessed Isle unless something radically changes.  Now for the current focus of our attention: the northeastern region. We want to settle this strait because it has a huge amount of food. However, we have a competitor: Rome! This is especially a problem because our border with Rome is our only real shot at a peaceful border -- we want to expand towards the south with Mali and Mongolia looking weak, and JackRB is also likely to expand south and thus come into conflict with us. So we'd like to avoid conflict with Rome. However, that unfortunately means we'll have to avoid settling the power spot in this region -- a hill city with four (!!!) food tiles and marble. The problem is that that city would steal the deer and fish from Rome's new city in that area, and thus create a huge amount of border tension. Unfortunately, our compromise city location comes with two major issues. First, it necessitates moving our eighth city to a worse spot due north of Ater. This shouldn't be a huge issue, as that city can still work cottages, the forest deer, the spices, and the crabs. But it's still an unfortunate city location compared to the original spot. The second issue is only potential, but it's still a problem -- notice Rome's warrior in the region? If that warrior is an advance guard for a settler, an eventual Roman city on the hill tile could completely lock us out of the resources in that location and force us to settle an even worse location on the plains hill to the south. (The real loser here is always the eighth city -- while there's a decent spot in the west that can work crabs and build a bot for the northern clams, it doesn't look like an ideal location. I think we'll be able to get a city out here, but the fact that I can't be confident makes me nervous.  Finally, let's take a look at our medium-term goal: the southeastern region. Our feelings on the potential city we have scoped out here can be summarized like this: Quote:Mjmd — Today at 12:42 AM By all rights, we should not be able to settle this area -- it's very close to the border with Mali, and we'd be claiming it as our ninth city. However, Mali is currently very weak -- they've been reduced to two cities! We should be able to execute a landgrab in their territory with impunity. We see a similar phenomenon happening with Mongolia, as Satus and JackRB's fifth city eat up a resource-filled jungle region that borders two of Mongolia's cities. The southeastern city location was originally supposed to go on the forest tile next to the mountain, but seeing how weak Mali is we've decided to move it to a better southern location with more choppable forests and first-ring food tiles. While there's nothing there that's super important resource-wise (though perhaps it could have iron in the future?), it's a decent spot with food and hills and an advantageous location if and when we decide to launch an attack on Mali. Now that you have an overview of the empire, let's take a look at how we stack up to our competitors.  We unfortunately only have Khmer's power graph right now, but at the same time that's the most important one. The important thing here is that we've essentially caught up to JackRB! The remaining difference between our power graphs is Iron Working, and the main utility of that tech is as a worker tech for clearing out the southern jungle. Once you count Khmer's power boost from Animal Husbandry, we're actually ahead in the raw unit count! I feel much more insulated against a western invasion like this. We'd still like to have more military, but it's coming!  Now let's take a look at demographics. The big thing to note here is that we're leading in food. We're keeping pace with the average in the other categories, but food is by far the most important this early in the game, and we're excelling where it counts. We've also moved up from last place in soldiers to fifth, showing the growth of our military. This is especially good keeping in mind that the early war between Mongolia and Mali is likely skewing the soldier count up from where we'd expect it to be. JesseL could also be skewing the numbers; I'm thinking the strategy there might be to build a big city, use it to produce a huge army, and then take someone over? That would certainly explain why the top competitor still has double our power when we're not too far off the average or minimum soldier counts. Overall, our position seems pretty good. We're expanding rapidly, we have a decent military built up, and two of our neighbors are locked in a conflict that appears to be dragging both of them down. We'd like to be a little more secure on the foreign front -- Rome worries me a little, what with them settling near us to the north, and there's an inevitable conflict brewing with JackRB -- but so far we're not in a terrible diplomatic position or anything. --- Before I go, let's talk terraces. The entire reason why Mjmd and I settled on Inca for the civ pick was the terrace. So did it pay off? Was the 45-hammer granary worth it? I think the answer is yes -- it's significantly improved the speed at which we were able to build up our civilization. So here's how long it took each of our cities to build a terrace: I think this is quite fast. It's even more so when you realize that we whipped a settler at Thalassina and built a spear at Foramen during this time. Why is that the case? Well, the 15 hammer discount actually matters quite a bit. At the time that we discovered Pottery, each of our cities was able to manage somewhere between 5 to 8 hammers a turn while still working food tiles provided they were at least size 3. That meant that we could get the cities into whip range in 2 to 3 turns working max hammers or finish with the help of a chop in about 3 to 5 turns. This is basically what you see here. I intentionally arranged Wolof's micro to get the Terrace into whip range on the turn we discovered Pottery, as I mentioned in a previous post. Ater was able to get into whip range as soon as it grew large enough to work both its food tiles and the cow mine. We finished a spear at Foramen before building the terrace so that it had an actual unit on defense, just in case, but after that we were able to build the terrace from scratch within four turns. Thalassina is the only outlier, but that was actually due to a micro goof where I misunderstood one of Mjmd's comments as telling me not to chop a forest that I should have chopped  . If I had chopped that forest, I think it would have been done within 4 or 5 turns. We ended up completing it with whip overflow from a settler; the longer time just came about because we lacked production at Thalassina while working all the available food tiles.We're again seeing the power of the Terrace discount at Satus. We're planning to chop two forests into the city as of now, which will instantly complete the terrace there (along with the one hammer base). You can't do this with an ordinary granary; you usually require a whip if you only do one or two chops at a low-food city. Getting the terrace built at Satus to accelerate growth is extremely important because the city has so little food, what with the food resource being a cow in the second ring, and we're only really limited in that respect by the size of our worker force. Blessed Isle is less well off, but we've basically just accepted that Blessed Isle is going to take a while to be a worthwhile location. 
T70:
note I expect a good T75 report from you Bellarch! Listen this is going to be a tipsy map review / complaint fest, but got Judaism is most preferred city of Wolof. Joshy / Amica moved an axe in range of Nok and didn't double play turn, but should be fine. ![[Image: 1oPodtI.png]](https://i.imgur.com/1oPodtI.png) Met Joshy from east, but I kind of figured. The most obvious feature of this map is the lakes to our east. 'Blob' maps have kind of fallen out of favor. The people in the middle end up with more neighbors, which is obviously a disadvantage. The lakes provide a pseudo 'safe' ish border. At least a border that it would be hard for more than just border cities to be exchanged. Makes sense to split 4 vs 3 if doing 'blob'. The western powers: Bellarch vs JackRB - listen there are other people, but um this is the dynamic to watch. Southern powers being super weak due to early war means we are both likely to expand south long term. The eastern powers: who borders Rome seems important. Joshy / Amica are tied with us for top # of cities. Vanrober got CoL with Oracle which as organized seems sweet, but balance with early units is tricky. The preferred set up is JesseL being in the middle / east and then Rome and Vanrober staring at each other for a while after they split. I wish we bordered Vanrober as we likely want open borders with neighbor that is supposed to be 'safe' border, but ah well. I persuaded Bellarch to go for safer city spot in the north partly off of an abbreviated version of this map review (if we bordered Vanrober I may have been ok pushing it even though likely could have won culture battle vs Rome easier than Van for the fish). Where in the bloody hell is the food!!!!!!!! The orange line is the approximate halfway mark. The red line is the line below which there isn't food unjungled not requiring calendar food....... You'll note there is a single floodplain in this zone (approx 65 total squarses). Assuming we went for early IW there is 1. I repeat ONE!!!!! jungled rice in that zone. We are desperately stealing cows (cows which barely count as food) from the warring southern neighbors, but I'm dying to know what the thought process was for this food situation. As to the peninsula to our NW: Quote:Bellarch: Yaaaaaaa. Obviously this peninsula counted towards this starts tile count and UMMMMMM it shouldn't have.......... Maybe there is a fish in the one black tile, which will still make it bad...... None of the land tiles are worth working outside of resource tiles. It isn't like it has the food to work the plains tiles well. It will have two very filler cities unless there is something in the 1 black square and then it would have 3 filler cities. The only redemption is we get to use terrace as a fresh water source once on the map / if you can call that a redeeming aspect. The western most wheat one is super awkward as JackRB is almost certain to grab fish well before us and can do so 1st ring, but best spot is still probably the hill that will put us right against. We have spotted a mountain island???? or peninsula?????? Kind of a big deal we don't have access to islands. I'm assuming there are none or people reviewing maps were as tipsy as I am now and didn't notice this start doesn't have easy access to any. Either way very interesting. I've never played without the economic benefit of islands or easy international trade routes, which is one of the economic steps in the game (think pottery, sailing, currency, CoL, and currently Optics). I told Bellarch I'm fine with 8 cities instead of 9 on turn 75 and we are growing some key cottage cities more. Edit: Bellarch commented I forgot about our horrible copper placement, but I already mentioned that, but good reminder for future maps.
Update Time
It’s Turn 75 76 -- we were in anarchy last turn! -- and it’s time for a (very) big overview of the state of the empire. The very short version is that we appear to be the leading civ so far, if not by much, for whatever that is actually worth at this point in the game. We’ve parlayed Stonehenge, our unique Terrace, and a fortunate war between our two southern neighbors into a position where we have the largest military among the major players, the most land area and culture of any civ, and we’re well-positioned for further expansion over the next 50-75 turns as our economy grows to a point where we can adequately support more cities. We have a holy city and we're already in Organized Religion to push infrastructure and religious spread. We have more cities and land than Khmer, more military and culture than Rome, and more military and cities than India. Our commerce is maybe lacking a bit, but with the help of Financial cottages it’s picking up, and our economy will hopefully soon outgrow our neighbors’. The big question right now is what we do next. The current direction of our civ is internal -- we want to expand a bit more, of course, but our main focus right now is discovering economic techs and building up our commerce potential. Right now we’re researching Sailing so we can finally unlock Lighthouses and Financial water tiles, and then towards Writing so we can build Libraries in our major cities. But it’s unclear where we should go next. There are two major economic techs that we’d like to have: Iron Working and Currency. Iron Working would allow us to start clearing the southern jungle and make Wolof, Foramen, Satus, and a potential two or three additional southern cities into stronger contributors. And of course, Currency is always essential to unlocking the commerce potential of an empire in CIV. We’d also like to have Code of Laws, Monarchy, and/or Calendar, but the benefits those techs provide are more minimal and we’d probably prioritize those after military techs like Horseback Riding or Construction. I think our next research priority is Iron Working -- the ability to improve the southern jungle is just too important for our civilization at the moment. But where after that is up in the air. Builds In addition to our eight cities, we have a sizeable military and workforce: four quechuas, six axes, three spears, and eight workers. This comes out to the second-largest military force on the map, along with enough workers that we’re not hurting for labor. Most of these have been built since we discovered Pottery. We can summarize the build list like so: This is pretty boilerplate, making use of our terraces to whip workers and settlers for 2 pop points and building military in the meantime. The real advantage that we had was being able to put up our unique granaries quickly thanks to the discount -- for anyone who’s unaware, in CtH Terraces only cost Inca 45 hammers instead of everyone else’s 60 hammer granaries. We’ve managed to build the world’s largest military and second-largest empire by city count despite spending a huge amount of early game hammers and chops on Stonehenge, which is entirely thanks to the power of terraces! It’s still early, but I think we can definitely say at this point that Inca is a good civ if you want to prioritize your early development. Now let’s take a closer look at our cities. The Core  Ater  Improvements: 2 Cottages , 2 Hamlets, 3 Camps, 1 Farm, 1 Pasture (formerly a mine) Mjmd was a little jealous because of how good our capital location was, and I can certainly see why! Ater has been absurd over the course of this game, providing enough food to regrow from whips and work tons of cottages while also occasionally putting in enough natural production to matter. We chopped the city to death building Stonehenge and our first few settlers, but it definitely paid off. Ater’s going to be our main commerce city in the short term, but once we are able to uncap happiness it should become a major production center as well. Either way, it’s clear why Ater is the most important city in the empire. For now, Ater will continue building military while growing to its happy cap -- soon to be lifted by a missionary out of Foramen. Our workers are in the process of building cottages on the remaining riverside grassland as well to take advantage of this population. (Don't worry about the one unimproved tile we're working, by the way -- that will change once we whip Foramen and Wolof takes back control over the key tiles they share. In the medium-term, we'll also be slow-build some settlers and workers at some point; the southern jungle must be claimed! Thalassina  Improvements: 1 Fishing Boats, 1 Cottage, 2 Farms, 2 Pastures, 1 Oasis Thalassina is the center of our expansion. Unlike Ater and Wolof, Thalassina doesn’t have much in the way of useful tiles besides its resources; it’s surrounded by hills, plains, coast, and desert. However, it has a lot of resources. It’s relatively rich in both food and production (especially with the newly discovered horses!), making Thalassina the best place to produce workers and settlers to grow the empire. And it’ll still contribute plenty of commerce in the long run once we get a lighthouse built and can get Financial benefits from water tiles. Thalassina’s immediate goal is building a work boat to improve the fish for Nok. However, once that’s done, the city is going to be turned into our chief unit pump -- primarily settlers and workers, but also the occasional axe or spear. We may also have to build a missionary for Blessed Isle there; we need the city in Organized Religion to get the most out of whip overflow into Moai! This city has so much production that it would be a waste not to use it on building things. Wolof  Improvements: 2 Hamlets, 1 Cottage, 3 Camps, 2 Mines Wolof is close to the platonic ideal of an early commerce city -- plenty of riverside grassland, plenty of grassland in general, gems, lots of overlap with a commerce-focused capital, and just enough production to still contribute to the growth of the military. The one thing that Wolof still lacks is food, but this problem is one it shares with all our major grassland cities. (Unfortunately this is not true for JackRB, whose cities generally have a lot more growth potential than ours from what we can see so far. Why are we the civ without corn?) Wolof’s central location also makes it an ideal holy city, able to spread religion to all corners of our empire. Wolof’s true potential is still gated behind Iron Working, but it’s contributing quite a bit right now. Wolof really just needs to grow right now. We just whipped a worker out of there -- it was necessary to continue development, but the lack of food hurts Wolof’s regrowth. That being said, we should have Wolof back at size 5 at least and working tons of cottages within the next 10 turns. Okoro  Improvements: 1 Camp Okoro has was just founded this turn, so it’s not got much to show for itself yet. That being said, it doesn’t really have to. Okoro exists for two reasons: it can work valuable tiles that no other city can reasonably reach in crabs and spices, and it allows us to build boats for the northern sea to reach the clams at Nok and explore to the north. That being said, it should eventually become a city with a decent mix of production and commerce, hopefully playing an important role in the future. Right now, Okoro is just building a work boat for its own crabs, and then it’ll move onto the terrace. We’ll also whip a work boat for 1 pop there at some point; Nok needs its clams! The Border Foramen   Improvements: 2 Farms, 2 Mines, 1 Cottage Foramen is perhaps the single most important city in our empire besides the capital. While it’s not a great city yet in terms of productive potential, what it is is the platonic ideal of a border fortress. Through its control of peak and hill tiles we’ve had complete visibility on JackRB’s third city ever since we popped borders, allowing us to skimp on garrison units and send our military to do more useful things like defend against pillaging barbs or guard new border cities like Satus. And if and when JackRB does try an invasion, we’ll be able to see him coming from a long way away thanks to Foramen’s cultural control. Long-term, I think Foramen wants to be a production city -- it has plenty of hills and a copper resource, enough food with farms and bananas to work those hills, and a location close to the front lines where those units can actually be used immediately if necessary. However, in the near term, its usefulness has come from its overlap with Wolof. When Ater is whipped down or otherwise working food tiles, Wolof takes over its cottages, and Foramen can in turn take over the gems, a cottage, and copper. Foramen is currently about to be whipped again, as its lack of improved tiles (that it doesn’t share with Wolof) makes it prime territory to be used to convert food into hammers. The plan is to put one turn into a missionary to get it to 9/40 hammers, whip for 2 pop, and then produce another missionary immediately after with the overflow. These will be used to convert Ater and Thalassina, which both are close to ramming their happy caps. After that, Foramen will go back to building military and waiting for workers to throw down some improvements. Blessed Isle   Improvements: 1 Fishing Boats Blessed Isle is the problem child of our civilization. While the city is an excellent border fortress right now, it greatly suffers in the short term from a lack of good tiles. Once we put up a Lighthouse, Blessed Isle suddenly becomes a city with a crazy food surplus and lots of commerce tiles from its lakeside location, but that’s gated behind Sailing. And with the Moai Statues, its production potential also goes through the roof -- it’ll get plenty of hammers from the water tiles, and then we have enough food surplus to just workshop and mine the rest of the land. The issue is going to be getting to that point. Right now Blessed Isle is finishing up its terrace, but we’re really waiting for Sailing -- we want to whip a lighthouse there ASAP so Blessed Isle can exploit its ridiculous lakeside lighthouse food surplus, both for growth and commercial reasons. That and we want to start building the Moai! Satus   Improvements: 1 Farm, 1 Pasture Satus is a weird location. On one hand, it won’t be a strong city until we get Iron Working and can start clearing away the jungle. On the other hand, it naturally can work gems, cows, and a grassland mine before then, along with a number of riverside grassland cottages. In the short term, Satus contributes by sealing off our western border, providing a nice commerce yield, and putting up decent production. In the long term, Satus will either be a strong commerce or production (or mix) city. It’s just a matter of getting Iron Working first. In the short term Satus is just going to finish the terrace and then build some military. I think we’re going to hold off on the whip here and just let it grow -- Satus has plenty of riverside grassland tiles for cottages even before Iron Working, and it’s growing slowly enough that we don’t really want to whip off population and lose access to its cottages for several turns. Nok   Improvements: 1 Camp Nok is our Great Person farm. That’s basically all it’s good for; while it does claim us marble, the main feature of this city is lots of food and not much else. We may be able to chop out a wonder here, but otherwise Nok’s main goal will be running specialists and maybe whipping the occasional worker or settler. It won’t ever be a great city, but it’ll serve a purpose. Right now Nok is building its terrace, and then likely will start building a lighthouse. We’re chopping the marble forest right now to build a quarry -- it’s too good of a tile under Financial not to work it! -- and then we’ll leave it to its own devices, building some axes and spears and stuff. Nok mostly just wants to grow right now, so that’s what we’re setting it up to do. The Frontier While these are all the cities we’ve built, let’s also take a moment to go through our potential sites for additional cities. There are basically two areas we want to settle: the northwest peninsula and the southern jungle. Garbo Peninsula  So we have this peninsula to the northwest of our territory with room for two cities. The problem is that neither of these cities will be very good. There’s basically no good tiles that aren’t food resources, and very few food surplus tiles to use besides. We need to settle cities here for strategic reasons -- we don’t want JackRB to get a base right next to our capital, and the cow city in particular can put some cultural pressure on tiles that we don’t really want JackRB to have like the forest hill northwest of Foramen -- but we don’t want to prioritize these cities simply because they are never going to be good. The Southern Jungle  To the southwest of our territory is an area that should probably be core territory for Mali and Mongolia. However, they’ve been at war for far too long, so this area is still ripe for settling. Now that they’ve signed peace they may start moving settlers in this direction, but I suspect it’ll still take them a while -- and if we can, we’d like to swoop in and take some of it for ourselves. Do we really think Mali is going to be able to contest the world’s second-largest military while they’re struggling on three cities without many resources? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. The yellow dot is still a hopelessly greedy spot, but the fact that I still can’t say for sure that we can’t grab a city there says a lot about how weak Mali is right now. Finally, now that we’ve gone through all our cities, let’s discuss how the overall game state has shaped up. Demographics First, let’s take a look at the four main indicators we have for how everyone is doing: GNP, production, food, and power. Unfortunately we only have these graphs for Khmer, India, and Rome -- but given that we’re the four civs that look to be power players right now, that’s probably sufficient. GNP  GNP is a weird indicator; it’s greatly skewed by the inclusion of culture, ktbs modifiers, and maintenance costs. (See the difference here between the demos screen with research at 100% and research at 0%). So it’s not entirely clear how we’re doing compared to everyone else just by looking at GNP. (There’s also the fact that we hook up another gem resource at Satus next turn, which will provide a sizeable boost that isn’t reflected in the current demographics). That being said, I think we’re doing okay in comparison -- not great, but okay. I think this should improve as we build more cottages and lighthouses. To give a better idea of where we stand economically, here’s our expense report. Nothing much to see here, just a very crashed economy . . . Of course, once we hook up the gems at Satus and grow some of our riverside cottages into hamlets (and cottage more tiles!), this will change quite a bit. So we look like we’re doing worse than we really are right now.  Production  The one indicator we’re really behind in is production. Does this matter, though? I’m not really sure. Fundamentally, the biggest reason why we’re behind in production is that we’ve been producing hammers using food instead via the whip. It’s also possible that India’s bonus for courthouses from being Organized is showing up in the production graph here, making it look like we’re further behind them than we actually are. That being said, this disparity is maybe an indicator that we should start to build a few mines once we’re done with this round of cottages. Food  Food seems to approximately correspond to the number of cities, so I’m not sure how useful it is to know. Theoretically, leading in food is indicative of power, but that means less when everyone is playing near-optimally and improving and working their food resources first! But it’s worth noting that we’ve been in the top three in food basically all game, judging by the demographics screen -- reflective of the success of our growth-oriented approach to development. Power  Unlike the other indicators, power does tell us something clear and useful. The main thrust of this is that we have the biggest military among the four leading powers -- JackRB has a higher soldier count, but they have 10K phantom soldiers over us due to having discovered Iron Working. We’re not leading by a huge amount, but we are definitely in the lead. Given that we’re 60 hammers behind everyone else due to building Stonehenge and after accounting for our terrace discounts, I don’t think this is a bad spot to be in military-wise. Demographics  Finally, here’s the full demographics screen. Of course you can spot the impact of Stonehenge here, skewing our land area and GNP upwards compared to the rest of the world (along with our score). The biggest issue that we see here is that we have a lower population compared to the other civs. Of course, that’s because we were whipping it all off earlier so it’s not really reflective of weak development on our part, but it’s something that we would like to change. Thankfully, we’re already getting started building missionaries out of Foramen to raise the happy cap in Ater and Thalassina, and growing and developing Ater and Wolof to be able to work tons of cottages. That should help us recover from this one deficit. Other Civs I’ll order the other players in the approximate order of how strong I think they are. Realistically the order isn’t very clear here -- the major thing to understand is that there have basically been three power tiers established by the gameplay so far, and the order within those tiers is unclear from the information we have. But we’re clearly in the top tier, which is what matters! 1. bellarch (Victoria of Inca the Dread Empire of Praes) Out of everyone, I think we’re in the best position so far. This is for three major reasons: first, we’ve capitalized heavily upon our early advantages from Stonehenge and Terraces, second, we’re best positioned to capitalize on the collapse of both Mongolia and Mali, and third, we have the most long-term commerce potential because we’re Financial.That being said, we’re not comfortably ahead. Rome, India, and Khmer are all keeping up with us. Furthermore, there’s the distinct possibility that we’re in the center of a ‘blob’ - where we’re in the middle and surrounded on all sides by other powers, while the other civs are just bordered by water and don’t have to defend on all sides. Certainly the fact that the remaining unestablished contacts are between eastern civs and western civs points in that direction. A major priority over the next 25-50 turns is building some chariots and sending them to investigate the continent to see whether this is true. Our geopolitical calculus depends a lot on whether we’re on a ‘blob’ or else e.g. JackRB has more neighbors besides us and Mongolia. 2. Joshy (Cyrus of Rome) Rome has expanded faster than anyone else -- even slightly faster than us! -- while pulling off what looks like a very well-executed farmer’s gambit. Of course, Rome is partially just doing well because they have a Charismatic leader and so can grow their cities bigger or whip more readily than we can, so we’ll see if this apparent advantage is still present later once the Charismatic bonuses are less useful. But so far, they appear to be ahead. I think we can have a decent working relationship with Rome. We already have a crab/crab deal going (would be fish/fish, but we don’t have fish yet), we haven’t settled on top of each other like we have with JackRB, and (most importantly) Rome probably has much weaker prey neighbors to go after early on. But we’ll see how that goes. 3. Vanrober (Asoka of India) India pulled off a major coup by building the Oracle and taking Code of Laws, giving them two religions (since they claimed Hinduism) and cheap courthouses. They also just built the Pyramids and flipped into Representation. The only reason why they’re not rated higher than Rome is the fact that they’re only on five cities right now. One thing to watch out for is that they appear to have very high production -- I think this may just be the courthouse multipliers showing up on the production chart, but I’m not sure about that. Regardless, India’s strength is a good thing for us; they’re a counterweight to Rome, and we’d very much like to not be bordering the only two other strong civs in the game! We’d like to eventually develop a close relationship with India -- maybe even prop them up if necessary -- but we should perhaps watch out for them trying to go for a cultural victory in the long run. 4. JackRB (Julius Caesar of Khmer) JackRB is our closest geopolitical rival and the biggest problem we currently have to face. Besides the fact that we’ve settled right next to each other along our border, there’s also the fact that we’re effectively in position to vulture Mongolia’s core territory. That being said, I think at this point we’d prefer to have JackRB as a neighbor compared to India. JackRB has not been expanding as fast as I’d expect -- they’ve been consistently behind us in city count -- they still haven’t claimed anything to expand borders despite having a gold resource available to work for commerce, and in general they’ve made some questionable tech choices like going for Iron Working very, very early. JackRB is definitely a threat to win the game, but so far I’m not convinced they’re as much of a threat to win as Rome or India. But based on geopolitical positioning alone, they’re certainly a huge threat to us. 5. JesseL (Churchill of Germany) There isn’t a nice way to say this: JesseL is probably playing the worst game of anyone right now. They appear to have been only growing their capital, not whipping at all, and (as one would expect from that) not expanding very much. They only had four cities when we met them on turn 70! By that point we had seven, and we could have had eight if we had been pushing expansion a bit more. We had four cities on turn 43! And they didn’t use the inherent advantages of a huge capital (extra commerce, more production) to build any early power wonders or found any religions or do anything else to give them any sort of major advantage over the rest of the field, from what I can see. There’s also at least one big gap they have: no precious metals! I’m not sure how this happened, but somehow JesseL appears to have completely missed claiming any gold or gems resources -- weird, considering that everyone else that we know of seems to have at least one. On top of all the in-game comparison data, there’s also the fact that the Churchill/Germany pick is very questionable, providing no early advantages other than extra trade route commerce -- even less valuable on this island-less map, though they would have had a way to know that going in -- and not picking up any real power traits. No, I’m not very worried about JesseL, other than that those huge cities could get snapped up by Rome or India and help them become bigger threats. 6. BING XI LAO (Hannibal of Mongolia) I thought going into this that Bing would be a major player; they have perhaps the best civ/leader combination and in particular a setup with Charismatic Mongolia that lends itself to war. Unfortunately, they appear to have tried a religious-oriented farmer’s gambit, similar to what we did, and were called on it. When we met Bing, Mongolia was already under attack from Malinese chariots, and while they appear to have defended against that attack successfully they’re still stuck on three cities and are currently losing prime territory to us and JackRB. They did found Buddhism, so they have perhaps a better foundation to build on than Mali, but unless they’re very lucky they’re likely to get snapped up by either us or JackRB (or both). 7. Rekenner (Catherine of Mali) Rekenner appears to have done a very good opening play, going for an early rush to capitalize on his leader’s early-game-focused traits. Unfortunately, they failed. The Mali - Mongolia war bogged down until a peace treaty was signed recently, relegating both civs to low city counts and essentially also-ran status in the process. We just got trade routes with them and their only resources are cow, deer, and rice! I think the only reason why they haven’t died yet is that they have Skirmishers. It’s possible that Mali is in a better place to recover than Mongolia -- unlike Mongolia, they haven’t had a major area of their core territory settled by two much more powerful players -- but they appear to be in a worse relative position. While Mongolia had been reduced to two cities to Mali’s three when we met them, Mongolia has since recovered to three cities, while Mali was reduced to two until recently! Whether this was because of barbs or a Mongolian attack is unknown, but it can’t be a good thing to have only two cities at any point past turn 50. I think Mali is probably the best target for an attack for us; I suspect that they have juicier core territory remaining, since JackRB and I already stole what looks like the best spot Mongolia had to offer outside of the capital. And it doesn’t look like we’ll have much competition from Rome for Mali, unlike JackRB and Mongolia. But we’ll see how the next portion of the game plays out. Summary So yeah, we’re winning! . . . well, for a certain definition of winning that doesn’t really mean all that much at this point in the game. Honestly, I’m just happy to be competitive at this point; I didn’t think I was going to do anywhere near this well when I started! Hats off to Mjmd here, who has done a great job of helping get me up to speed with the ins and outs of the Pitboss meta and provided solid advice throughout. Anyway, don’t expect anything too exciting from us in the near future -- well, apart from maybe some hilariously aggressive city plants? But other than those, we’re mainly planning to build more cottages, grow cities bigger, and generally do your basic core empire-building stuff. It's served us alright this far! That being said, we’ll definitely be doing some more interesting things once we get deeper into the game. Mali and Mongolia are very tempting targets . . . |
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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
