[PB62] Tarkeel and civac feel the need for speed

[Tarkeel]

Turn 74 (1040 BC)
We had a slight scare when Naufragar declared war on T70, but that was obviously the terms of the peacedeal he took with Superdeath. Thus the war ended without even seeing an enemy unit. Meanwhile we've been squeezing our economy for all it's worth, and are even build cottages on riverplains over floodplains because they're faster to build. We currently almost have enough gold to get to Sailing, but we're taking a detour to settle HotStuff, before Sochi will whip out a galley for Iceland.


That is, if our luck holds. I mis-calculated and the axe in the north has a small chance of reaching Sochi to interrupt our plans if it survives the chariot attack. Out in the east our scout has been dancing with SD's chariot for the last few turns. The other scout has walked through Vanrober's lands, and he seems to have a serious issue with worker labour as we've seen several forests being worked.





Jerez is a rather new circuit, opening in 1985. Due to the remoteness the Spanish Grand Priz was moved to Barcelona in 1990, but the circuit has hosted the European Grand Prix until a dignitary kerfuffle in 1997 got them banned from hosting. The track was popular with the Formula 1 teams for winter testing, until the 2015 restrictions on testing stopped it.

[civac2]

Did the chariot win? 

[Tarkeel]

Nope. Because there wasn't a fight... The stinky barb axe moved N to the grasshill WSW of Sochi instead, out of range of the Chariot but unable to attack this turn either.
Edit: We did kill the archer at Spa though.

[civac2]

Capital! Then if we had moved the Kyalami axe last turn it would have made it to Sochi in time.

[Ginger()]

I’m a green and I’m trying to understand how to make the “settle everything in sight” work out. Isn’t this stalled tech pace very vulnerable if someone comes with Construction units? Have you run into worker shortages with 10 cities, how did you balance the worker/settler/units build order? Sorry for questions that are probably obvious (I’ll reread the whole thread to get a better idea), coming from singleplayer I’m just totally shocked to see 10 cities this early :D

[civac2]

It's important to understand that the conditions here are different from a typical singleplayer game. There is lots of food and rivers everywhere. Moreover, we are working two gold mines and a gem mine with another gold mine to come. Standard map scripts generate land of this quality only very rarely. While the maintenance costs are high due to Small map size the difficulty is only Emperor. We are also ORG.

In general it is usual for MP games to involve rapid expansion at the cost of the economy. Most players won't go to such extremes as we did losing money at 100% tax at several points instead expanding a bit slower (but still fairly quickly) and look to key wonders or a religion to gain an edge.

Militarily, we can defend ourselves vs catapult/axes with pure axes and vs horse archers with spears to an extent. The first unit axes/spear really can't handle are war elephants. This is a bit academic though. The other factions aren't in much better shape than we are financially.

[Tarkeel]

Those are actually rather good questions, and I think civac answered it pretty well. We have indeed been a bit too greedy on the foodhammers over commerce, so our workers have been mostly building cottages lately. The only non-resource mine in our enite empire was built by Fabled before we captured the city.

It's not uncommon to limp to key economic techs, Currency being the most obvious one but for us Sailing will also do the trick due to inter-continental traderoutes (ICTRs). I don't think we've covered in sufficent detail how we've balanced, but it mainly comes down to micro-planning: if you sit down and think through what all your workers and cities will do for the next 10 turns or so, it quickly becomes apparent if the balance is wrong. If you don't have enough workers your cities will grow onto unimproved tiles faster than you can whip away the population. If you have too many workers you run out of useful stuff for them to do, but that can usually be converted into chopping more forests or building strategic roads.

[civac2]

SD appears to have researched Ironworking.



Time to upgrade out anti-SD bastion. A bunch of cities will use their natural hammers for more axes. Between various resource tiles, the gold mines, city tiles and plains cottages there is a enough production to finish an axe in a few turns. If SD makes a serious attempt we will have to double whip them, of course.

The picture also shows our scout keeping an eye on SD's northern border so that he can't suprise attack us over the uncontested area to our east. His power kept increasing in 4k intervals for a while. Those could have been chariots but also spears.

There is a fairly high chance SD's praetorians will visit naufragar on SD's far side. naufragar is a much softer target than we are. He has only 4 cities after he lost another city to Mjmd (burnt this time). Together, Mjmd and SD should be able to take him out.

No serious fighting yet, though.



Mjmd shifted the skirmisher in his border town westward, this turn replaced with a new one.



This border also has a walled border fortress. So, why are we so jumpy?



Because we are winning pretty hard. If we get enough time to reach Code of Laws and Monarchy or Calendar the game should be nearly over.

[civac2]

When loggin in to make more screenshots I caught some fun developments.



This picture was meant to illustrate the close bordes and resulting tensions between naufragar, Mjmd and vanrober. But Mjmd's chariot stack does distract a bit from that. Shattered Palace was probably Bing's capital. Both newbies got Animal Husbandry starts then. No wonder they died.

Equally important is SD's new settler on the move.



Tarkeel suspects this settler is meant to secure iron for his unique unit. There should be a chariot hanging around north of the settler but otherwise it is curiously lightly guarded.

Back to the intended programming:

Tarkeel had considered making a road to vanrober from Indianapolis via the copper tile. vanrober is the only player with Writing and he graciously agreed to sign an open border deal with Spain.



You can still see the remnants of that plan in the marker and the imprudent course of the road between Indianapolis and Jerez. The terrain east of Lithium is amazingly unfriendly to roadwork and vanrober showed no sign of developing his copper.

So instead we will settle an island city in the icy north.



I hope the inhabitants like fish. This way we are not dependent on vanrober's goodwill which is fairly relevant with 90% more food than the number two.

Tarkeel also has nearly convinced me to settle Silvercove in the south.



The city is mainly meant to exploit the silver but it will become quite strong eventually. It would be possible to settle the city one tile east to gain access to the silver immediatly which would both be good for our happy cap as well as the economy. We are both too greedy to do such a thing though.

Silvercove will also cost 13+gpt with a best case additional income of 5gpt. (The greed though. See above.)

[civac2]

Cities are currently allowed to grow to their happy cap and likely even beyond in some cases. That skews the food demos a bit. Mjmd is whipping units for war. He would be closer otherwise.


Silverstone



The economic focus is very evident here.


Sakhir



Settled to grab the copper as quickly as possible. One of our weaker cities but it has contributed a lot due to its age.


Monaco



Fabled's ill-considered forward plant. With the borders expansion it has come into its own. We invested some hammers into Stonehenge here. Sadly, it's not likely someone else is gonna build it and turn those hammers into gold. Mayhap, we shall finish it some distant day.


Spa



Fabled's capital. Part of the reason for planned Silvercove is to give away the sheep. The deer could already be off-loaded to Indianapolis. The darn thing is just growing too fast.


Zandvoort



The anti-SD bastion. Settled without either of its food sources in the first ring. I would not have done this without Tarkeel's insistence. While the city was a drain on our economy for a good while it now guards the entire south and does allow us to backfill Silvercove.