[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[scooter]

He did triple whip upon logging back in, so that could be a Musketeer, but it also could be a settler.

Correction, -22 points is a 4 pop whip. That is obviously not possible as nobody has had a size 8 city or even close, so he double whipped two cities back to back. Slight chance that was two Musketeers, but also could be something much less interesting. Just keeping an eye on it because "get to 3 cities and then chop/whip Musketeers" is a very plausible plan, especially if he's as close to someone as I am Yuris.

[Zed-F]

Regarding next city…. I’m thinking not silk city for city 6. It can probably wait a bit. It’s a slow grower and requires worker support since it doesn’t make much use of water tiles. Both an island or Tom would contribute a lot faster, and we want to prioritize our timeline to WEs. An island would be better for researching them, but Tom might be better for actually building them since it has more food to regrow after whipping and doesn’t need boats to move troops to the front. To me that suggests island, then Tom while galley explores locally, then we see what makes sense.

Another thought here — if we build cities 6 & 7 on islands / Tom and build Oracle in city 5… where exactly can Cataphracts really hurt us? Our two front cities will have substantial cultural defenses from Oracle / holy city culture. Yuris won’t have siege or be remotely close to getting it. Plus we’d be able to build walls with stone, if necessary. We’d still want a defensive city near silk to protect our capital’s flank, but I’m not sure how he does anything more than pillage a few tiles in that situation. I guess WEs might not benefit much from cultural defense, but our other copper units would.

[Qgqqqqq]

I agree with Construction over Machinery. The main motivator for me is the expense of galleys + macemen. I think we want to REX as much as possible now we have GLH, and WE are a defensive play, while zerks are an aggressive one - we're not keeping backline cities so it's zero sum until we can eliminate Yuris.

[scooter]

Definitely agreed on not rushing for Metal Casting/Machinery. I'm pretty sold on pushing top of the tree next.


Anyway, I think I figured out the settling plan.





7 cities and GLH (barring a coin flip tonight) by T62. The island cities waiting all the way until 8+ is largely because the logistics of getting a Galley out slows it down, and these are all good spots. Western pigs/silks is the one debatable one in location. I can be convinced to move it 1S for sure. It will have a missionary ready to go immediately, but it does still mean 10 turns of weak ring 1 tiles, but given how many other cities are fast starting, I'm generally OK with this one. In my view I'm sacrificing some city development for a city that feels a bit better tactically and strategically.

This will all give me time to get a Galley or two out somewhere. How this is happening is more or less this straight from my notes:

eot46: worker from kendall for Connor
eot48: whipped settler from logan
eot50: worker from logan
eot54: hindu missionary from kendall, could convert west dot by t57
eot57: settler from logan
eot60: whipped settler from shiv

To demonstrate how ridiculous Logan is, let's break down it's next 10T more clearly.


46: Finish GLH with no overflow
47: Put 1T into a settler
48: double whip settler -> sz4
49-50: 2T worker at size 4 with overflow from settler
51-53: grow from size 4 -> size 6 while completing 2 warriors
54-57: 4T settler at size 6


Utterly broken. Shiv is also getting out a settler for Tom because it's first ring tiles are so crazy good, and it's getting a copper chop/mine, so the Granary completes at size 2 without a whip. I'm giving it 2T of Judaism holy city culture to pickup the Sheep (there will be delays if that misses) before actually revolting into Hindu/OR just in time to whip Kendall's Granary with the bonus. It's pretty tightly planned, and I'm happy with how it looks.

One quirk of planning Logan is what to do with the 3 foods - deer/deer/fish. The west Deer is always being worked, but the south Deer is shareable with Roman and the lake fish with Kendall. It's slightly less efficient to give the Fish to Kendall (-1F), but also it's slightly less efficient to work the Fish in Logan because it gets no +50% production. The net effect is when I'm growing, I'm often working the Fish and sometimes giving south Deer to Roman, but when building workers/settlers I give the Fish to Kendall to grow on so that I can lean into a hammer config. It's not always exactly like this, but it's sort of how it works out most of the time.

[Zed-F]

I think I really prefer 1N of pigs to 2N of pigs.

• Having a city 2N of pigs and wasting 10T of development is huge when we only have ~20T after it's founded before Cataphracts start being built. We still get access to both forests in the BFC if we found 1N of pigs, after the border pops, but getting food online sooner is more important than getting one of those chops online sooner.
  
• I'm not convinced getting access to several jungle tiles north of the mountain is better than having access to three extra water tiles on the south coast, when we will need a lighthouse for the lake anyway, and won't be able to clear jungles or build hammer improvements on anything other than hills for quite a while yet. There's no other city that would be able to make use of those southern coast tiles, but there are other citiy sites that could use the land. It's probably better to let cities in the jungle belt claim the jungle when we get around to that sort of thing.
  
• The city is 5 road tiles away from any potential reinforcements, so we need to focus on how we are going to minimize its vulnerability. If we found 2N of pigs then a corner attack could come in from the sugar 2NE and our holy city culture will not be in a position to prevent it. If we found 1N of pigs then holy city culture will cover the corner and the city can't be hit as easily in a 1 turn attack. It also makes the city a bit less attractive for Yuris to hit since it's a bit further away and gives Yuris fewer options for pulling wounded troops back after hitting it.
  
• The convenience of not needing to build a fort on desert in the long term is not worth the short term costs for the defense of the city. Any worker turns we save on the fort for the canal are only going to happen way way in the future. We can't benefit from a canal here until we (a) build a second city further to the NW, (b) are able to defend it, and ( c) are able to spare resources in our core from the defense of our core, i.e. as opposed to letting our initial island colonies proliferate and spread mostly on their own.
  

If we are *really* concerned about being 5 road tiles from reinforcements we should consider settling on the southern silk, but I don't get the sense that we are expecting to need to be quite that focused on defense and development speed over long term prospects.

[scooter]

Good points all-around. Honestly I sort of forgot about the southern silk settlement option. I definitely don't hate it. Will think about it.

[Zed-F]

I do like the fact that settling on silk means we don’t need capital defenders as well as silk city defenders, and don’t need to worry about pillagers coming after our roads and critical resource tiles. That could be a decisive benefit since it means we might need fewer hammers sunk into defenses, and can put more hammers into expansion since we are less vulnerable to a potential head shot attack.

Theoretically if we found on silk we could someday found a marginal fishing village 1W or 1N2W of pigs, but that’s also way in the future and a super low priority location unless there is seafood in that single fogged tile.

[Zed-F]

I wonder if Oxy’s 22 point increase this turn is also capital culture boosted by Terrace or if it’s some combination of other factors.

[scooter]

I wonder if Oxy’s 22 point increase this turn is also capital culture boosted by Terrace or if it’s some combination of other factors.

Well, I can tell you what those points are not.





Great Lighthouse because that completed.





I think I've come around to south Silks after thinking about some of the comments and envisioning what a Cataphract invasion might look like. I agree the west city would just be way too isolated in the other configuration. I think this configuration would work great, so that's what I'm leaning towards right now. (No, that turn timer is not a mistake, the timer ran down to like an hour despite simultaneous turns and 5 players.)





Forgot to remark on this. That horse is in a decent but not amazing spot for Yuris, and his 3rd city was placed east of this. It's one of those things where I sort of wonder if it's deniable.





The south pole ended up not being a dead end like I thought, and it appears we will meet Luddite next turn for our troubles. I may have to declare on him to pass through, although I'd really prefer not to in order to not disrupt trade route peace modifiers. Of course, it's likely he'll refuse to sign them with me, so it's a tricky calculus. I may park the WB for a few turns until Writing comes in and then see how responsive he is.





Meanwhile, it does seem like I'm hitting a dead end the other way. It's really hard to see, but 1NE of the WB looks like the corner of a coastal tile, but sadly I cannot reach over. It's possible there's a south pole coastline here like there is on the other side, in fact fog-gazing suggests it goes a bit further. Will have to wait to find out.





On one hand, the tech rate is unlike anything I've seen in an early game. Break-even is 50bpt on T47 for me right now. On the other hand, look at the top soldier count. That's up by 17k soldiers. Musketeers are 9k apiece. I'm almost positive Cairo double whipped 2 Musketeers last turn, as +18k -1k for 2 net pop loss (-4 whipped + 2 regrow) fits more or less perfectly. So uh, good luck with that somebody.

[Zed-F]

That seems like a huge sacrifice in growth to get a 2-3 Musketeer attack. Isn’t that playing to lose? Even if he razes another player’s capital it just seems like someone else somewhere else that’s not involved will be the main beneficiary.

I guess we can hope that’s pointed at Oxy but I’m guessing he’s on 5 cities now right? It’s hard to see how 2 Musketeers would be more than a major inconvenience to someone with a significant number of build queues, so it’s probably 3. I guess I don’t know the geography and that could make a big difference to whether the attack makes sense from an operational perspective, even if I think it could be premature from a strategic perspective.