[PB64] Amicalola Gets To Heaven with Tarkeel and Ljubljana

[Amicalola]

T83 - Barbs Strike Again
So that axe sure appeared out of nowhere. We lost the 33% with our own axe, but did quite a bit of damage. I move the spear to this tile:


Assuming the axe promotes to Combat1, vodka gives us an 83% chance of winning. Losing is a bit of a disaster, forcing another suboptimal whip in poor Distant Past (functionally costing us a worker). But I'm not that unlucky, right?

[Amicalola]

T86 - Dreadsprings

This one is too long so I had to get creative.



Dreadsprings is a filler city that will steal the sheep, designed not to require any military, and not annoy anyone. And there's pretty clearly someone that I don't want to annoy.

Because Gavagai sure isn't afraid to throw his weight around! Hopefully he realises that I'm fully on-board with Team Gav, because this is interesting....


And not what I was expecting!

Edit: There is an interesting debate to be had here. Should we be settling up on Gavagai because he is clearly busy with other things, or should we be staying the heck out of his way because he is clearly willing to get busy? I am leaning towards the latter, mostly because my military is very hodgepodge and I'm too risk-averse to settle up in that context. But quite possibly I am wrong in this case. Dilemma dilemma...

[Amicalola]

T87 - The Wheel and The War  

Naufragar attacks! 


And offers this. I don't really understand it, but maybe he wanted to whack our warrior (which he did  ). Probably it's something to do with us founding The Wheel:


I have enough defenders here to feel pretty safe about founding it (although this exact worry was a motivation for Dreadsprings' location). We can actually garrison the jungled hill and turn it into a bonus for us. 

I offered Naufragar peace. I guess if he declines his chariot could pillage the farm, but that's about it. He only whipped once on his turn, and the power is equal to ours, so I doubt there's a massive stack coming. But I'm nervous - I hate how easy I am to psych out.

[Tarkeel]

Dreadsprings is a filler city that will steal the sheep, designed not to require any military, and not annoy anyone. And there's pretty clearly someone that I don't want to annoy.

Because Gavagai sure isn't afraid to throw his weight around! Hopefully he realises that I'm fully on-board with Team Gav, because this is interesting....

[...]

Edit: There is an interesting debate to be had here. Should we be settling up on Gavagai because he is clearly busy with other things, or should we be staying the heck out of his way because he is clearly willing to get busy? I am leaning towards the latter, mostly because my military is very hodgepodge and I'm too risk-averse to settle up in that context. But quite possibly I am wrong in this case. Dilemma dilemma...

That's Superdeath's culture BTW; Gav is to his south.

[Amicalola]

T88
Nauf offers peace for The Wheel. Yeah, ok buddy.  He whipped four more pop. last turn, and his power is rising - I'm starting to worry that this is a real war. 

Here's the current front:


The chariot can't threaten anything major this turn, and we have workers roading between Get To Heaven and The Wheel. I am pretty worried about another chariot jumping out of the fog, but at least we'd have a turn's warning. As long as it happens next turn we'll be fine - I shouldn't have moved the spear onto the hill though.

Some good news:


Gavagai continues to whip units, but most seem to be in Superdeath's direction. Even if he changes his mind, they're a good number of turns away. Go Gav! 

That's Superdeath's culture BTW; Gav is to his south.

That wasn't what I meant, but it's not your fault - I forgot to actually explain myself.   Instead of Dreadsprings' actual location, I'd originally been planning to settle it here:

 
I'm pretty sure this location would piss Gavagai off a lot. And clearly he's not afraid to act on that, even if he's busy right now. The kicker was the worker roading (initially on the plains cottage) - it looks to me like Gav is preparing to settle this spot himself, and I didn't want to enrage the clearly-enrageable. I guess we'll let Gav have the stone - it sucks (PRO walls/castles get boosted even more by Stone, as does Moai), but it's better than having the Gavagaian Horde slammed into us, like two of the other players seem to have experienced. Of course, if he takes long enough, there's still room to change our minds.

[Tarkeel]

That road could also be used to go north; those mountains are quite blocking. I do agree it's likely for him to settle here to have a good border. Personally I'd settle on the stone: It's more defensible, and can be used for canal later on.

[Amicalola]

That road could also be used to go north; those mountains are quite blocking. I do agree it's likely for him to settle here to have a good border. Personally I'd settle on the stone: It's more defensible, and can be used for canal later on.

Gavagai will almost certainly settle there within a couple of turns - he's moved his axe/chariot with the worker onto the stone, to road that too. I think he'll probably settle exactly our spot.

Naufragar offered a ceasefire, which I accepted. No guarantee that he won't just redeclare in a couple of turns, but it's a promising sign. He did whip quite a few units though; the optimistic take is that he's attacking Commodore like I suggested (and like would be smart! Commodore's power is nil! Commodore has the Colossus! Naufragar is FIN!). The pessimistic take is that he's just trying to put us at a false ease - I'm moving more units to defend the hill.

[Amicalola]

Gavagai made peace with Superdeath, giving him back his city. A decent amount of blood seems to have been shed first, based on the power graph, with Gavagai losing the top spot to Ginger. The big effect of the war seems to have been crippling Superdeath economically (he did A LOT of whipping), but Gavagai did not gain any territory - I wonder how that will work out for him long-term. I am also very curious to see if Superdeath can recover from his position.

I am a little worried about Gavagai marching against us, because we are quite ahead in food (though not in the other stats, so perhaps I shouldn't worry). But food is the most important one, regardless, and now Gavagai is free to act as he wishes, while Naufragar's power continues to grow.   I've built barracks' in our core cities over the last five turns, so we should be able to whip in case of emergency. Get to Heaven will also pop borders next turn, which combined with a scouting axe gives us strong visibility over Gavagai's attack vector. Still, I worry.

Our economy is struggling, because we have to expand south which has very high maintenance costs. Well, maybe the no cottages thing isn't helping.

Re: no cottages - I am planning a bigger writeup on why I'm trying this variant, but for now I will say I am sticking to it, even if it significantly damages our win chances. It's actually probably made virtually no difference so far, though it will start to soon. The game is tempting me though - we got our first event, which was the truffles one, in the north. So now we have a 3/0/1 dry grassland, shared between the capital and Blast Doors, which might be the most cottage-able tile I've ever seen in Civ4. Grumble Grumble. 

Apologies for the lack of reports - I'm really busy at the moment. I'll do a big overview ASAP, probably around T100 (which works out nicely anyway, in a sense). Then we'll be back to our usual programming.

[Amicalola]

I got a spare hour, and I liked my T100 Overview idea so instead you get this post.

No Cottages - The Reasoning
So there is a reason that I'm doing this variant, and committed to sticking with it even if it becomes game-costing: I don't think cottages are as essential as the meta dictates. In PB60, we built barely any of them, and maintained a tech lead for most of the game. In PB56, the only team that came close to matching Noble was us, using Serfdom. But it feels like people on RB view cottages as the 'One Right Choice' sometimes, and that bothers me. I'd like to try and prove otherwise (and I invite discussion on this topic!).

There are so many ways to get commerce that aren't cottages. Commodore and I have already built the two best ones. But others exist too - there's the Monk Economy and Serfdom, two I've already mentioned. And now I've been thinking of others, things that would never normally occur to me. "What if I build Shwedagon Paya, and convert to Free Religion in the first GA?" "Which cities can I just give granaries to, before setting them on long-term Wealth builds?" These are questions that wouldn't even occur to me in a normal game, and I'm really enjoying the difference here. It makes me see why the RB players of old were so variant-focused, and sad that I missed out on the Epics/Adventures.


There's also no better game to try it from a 'winning' perspective:

• I'm Protective, for the bonus trade-route yield.
  
• The land is extremely food-barren. That makes Serfdom stronger, and Slavery/cottages weaker.
  
• I landed the Great Lighthouse (for the 4th game in a row ).
  
• The capital has no river tiles, and in fact we have 5 river grasslands across the whole Empire (3 of which belong to poor Regret).
  
• Most importantly - I'm trying to keep this game light and fun for myself. Sure, I'm doing my best to win, but it's a random map with random events and tribal villages, not to mention three of RB's biggest psychopaths (up to the reader to identify ). If all of my arguments are incorrect, and 'no cottages' is actually a game-losing variant, there's no game I'd rather lose than this one. So there's also that morale safety net, I suppose.
  

I think one of the most important skills in Civ4 is the ability to think outside the box, to identify and commit to niche strategies that become stronger in a given situation, and this is certainly practice for that. It's probably a mentality that was cemented by my PB59 trade economy, and PB56 Serfdom before that, but I think it's true of all games. So maybe I don't understand Civ4 (well, CtH) half as well as I think, and this will be a disaster. But even then, I hope it will be a interesting experiment to squeeze commerce out of all the other methods in the game, and improve my thinking habits in the process. That sounds pretty fun to me.

[Cornflakes]

Great people are one category missing: bulbs, trade missions, super specialists