[pb74 spoilers] Miguelito and Ginger bring about the end of the world

[Ginger*]

Yes his city was such a reach and we did not do a grave cosmic injustice by punishing it. But he's already made a lot of the investment with workers roading, so I'm worried about a counter attack

Could you share that excel/sheets doc with me? I really like the use of the comparison spreadsheet, "Decision Matrix" by my upbringing, but I do think you have a couple points wrong in some spots, so I'd like to copy and paste it and edit in my own thoughts :P

Also since I can't log in, can you post graphs next turn?

Of the options I'm going to straight veto purple and green. Purple is a crime against civ asking to crush a 4/2/1 tile, its very exposed, and it will almost certainly lose that second cow to a city from Metal planting it first ring (its what I would do). Green has starts with one forest and no food in first ring, has an awkward culture battle for its first ring tiles. It's antagonistic while neither being strong short term or long term.

Orange is good for all the reasons that Red is good, but I'm not sure that it is that much safer. It is as far out on our road network, and trades hill defense for one tile distance, it's vaguely less antagonistic but in my mind if he was going to attack Red he probably would attack Orange, it also settles one turn slower and has a 1h base tile instead of 2h which is not ideal. Also + the cow is ready improved

Blue and Brown are cool because they are much safer, closer to us and farther from him, and both zone out his settlements from this area:
I think Blue having hills all around it is actually good long term defense because it cannot be surprise struck by 2movers (yes Guerilla and Mobility exist but please), short term defense yes is he could camp on our tiles. However Blue has the concern that we lose the cow to a first ring plant by Metal or Donovan

Brown is very interesting and the first option I considered as a real credible alternative to Red, because its very safe, unprovocative, still really zones out Magic science (if he wanted the cow he'd have to make a hilariously exposed plant on the floodplains 1N of the tile). However we would have to add another city, 1S of purple dot, to claim the cow (if Metal lets us). However long term combined with black dot we have a nice compact defensible setup.

With Red I imagine having to move black dot 1S to squeeze in a filler between the two rather than have gaping distance.

[Miguelito]

Magic Science took our peace offer.


He gets to bring his workers home (although I haven't seen them, must be in the SE by metal's city, or he dissolved them facing those axes? But then he should not have taken peace, because now we are free to install ourselves on the red dot, ie on top of the city ruins.
We debated this a lot, but ultimately the city is too good to pass up on, and we need some bonus after what this war cost us.

Ginger requested graphs so here we go:












yeah, not doing too swell, but we know why, we have some good stuff coming up yet, and none of our contacts has a 4th city yet, which we will next turn.
GKC with Nebu has great stats, wonder what he's doing.

[Miguelito]

Forgot to add the one chart that matters:


Now of course not everybody will be convinced that more whips -> better, to which I say . At least puts that MfG chart in context, and demonstrates the power of our early granaries. Of course we are starting to feel anger stinging - mind all of this has been in just 2 cities. We can go on 3-whipping settlers for a little while while tolerating some red faces, but the settler after the next should go east and allow the capital to give away some of its food, so as to slow down the cycle. Around that time also gold should come online. Ragnarök will whip once more for a much needed 3rd worker, then it might just slow build the next one to cool off. Around that time Atlantis, which has spent a frustratingly long time at size 1 working the copper mine (blame MS!) should hopefully join in the fun, and the new city will be on it very quickly, so I hope we can keep the number high, although I expect to lose the lead.

I also think I said it before - metal imo is squandering João - what are cheap granaries good for if they don't help convert food to hammers?

[Ginger*]

Peace in our time! This is great news for us, although we should be watching MS's score and power graph like a hawk (also check EP spending every other turn to make sure he's not trying to juke our vision)

High crop and mfg is explained by low whips, for both GKC and Metal. Nebu is interesting, we should keep an eye on Metal Casting KTB bc I imagine that's where GKC is heading. OTOH GKC has played his last +3 games here pretty checked out so idk if he has much of a plan or is maybe just in it for casual fun.

Well Metal is lagging relative his traits but he also built 2 axes very early and sent one yonder our way. As far as whips go, I'd hazard a guess that he was seduced by the promise of building IMP settlers with mines. (Did I ever mention I really don't like Imperialistic?)
He's also built two monuments (see culture graph). Despite these less-than-efficient expenditures, I'd have to assume that he has built granaries by now though. 

We are a little worried that Metal might try to steal the sheep (well on our side of the meridian). This is not assuaged by the warrior camping on our intended black dot. However, we've proven once we're not to be fucked with, so surely we can prove it again!   
(*haha, right? nervous laugh*) 

But if he doesn't pull a stunt like that and we do get a secure west in 5 turns, I'll be very happy with our position looking forward

Can you check if that Korean warrior is fortified? If its been there a while that would raise my hackles
For our red dot city do you have a name picked out? I was thinking The Flood, since those are our only floodplains in the entire empire

Also small micro note, another scout would be useful, I'm not necessarily saying to prioritize one, but if we're going to end up with >15 but <30 hammers between a growth cycle, I think i'd rather have another scout built than 15h stored in queue.
We nee to know more about MS and Metal's surrondings to predict their actions, plus the usual KTB hunting and far-off meet and greet

[Miguelito]

Here we are, with our slightly exposed new supercity!
Plan is to just have it provide its own defense. By the time peace runs out it will have the Obelisk, pop to whip an axe, the granary mostly finished, and both border forests chopped so as not to give him cover. Might chop the third forest as well for more speed. We can look far enough into MS's territory that he can't just appear out of the fog

And yes, our citizens are unhappy, and the one answer we have to that for now is the whip . The next settler absolutely has to come at full speed, after that we could take off some of the heat and whip a bit slower.
Also gold and forges coming online.
Ginger is proposing we go for early monarchy and he might have a point.

Before we enter the next round of the whippening, take a moment to bask in the glory of graphs:










Pretty good, with 2 cities still at size 1. Now globally on demographics we're not doing too hot, but for this neighbourhood sure seems fine.

However I still find ways to mess things up:

[Ginger*]

Yeah stats are good, the neighborhood is cozy, but our borders are long and exposed. I think Monarchy will be very helpful specifically because we're gonna need a standing army, not enough defensive depth for queue shadow army.
I think Metal if he is motivated to win against us will probably try to make a play around Hwacha's out of necessity to our scaling potential that we need to have a credible counter to. We should probably assume tech parity with him because despite Joao vs Org, he has had a slow expansion so he won't be crashing and burning. In the spreadsheet where I was tallying costs of techpaths I also compared how much it would take him to research Construction

In our discussions you seem to assume that conquest will follow our inevitable economic superiority to the neighborhood as our traits carry us ahead. But I am concerned that we might not have an actual plan if our neighbors want to make a move. Sure we can probably whip defenders, but I'd rather be setting the agenda than reacting to it. TBH i'm not sure where I'm going with this argument. But I feel a distinct unease in accepting the usual Guilds MO because the map is tight and our neighbor relations suspect.

Another way to phrase it is I think the map was telling us that our pick or the theory behind it was wrong, and I'm not sure how much we should or can listen to the map.

[Miguelito]

70 food boggles my mind. Nobody has more than 5 cities. 5 cities making 14f each means two 5 food ressources plus a grassland. And that doesn't count mines and such. And in fact those 5th cities are not old enough to be over size 2 yet. I'm at a loss.


Sorry affair here. This city has only ever worked the copper mine at size one. What was planned as a rather nice quick granary aided bya chop had to be interrupted for a slowbuilt axe, so now the city is 14 turns old and has never grown . Finally going to.

oh and tricky old boy Plemo razed a (big) Tarvac city and founded two himself all in one turn (demos are from right before)

[Miguelito]

oh my it's 78 this turn -.-



Due to lack of underlying substance I fear we will not be able to keep our lead midterm, so enjoy while we can:


Note the three from Plemo. That's 6 (Imp) settlers plus whatever military he needed to raze that Tarvac city. Astonishing. (yes I know how mines work but still, how can it be so fast?). 275k max pop is also a symptom.
Some might say that this proves how I'm wrong with all the whips, seeing as we are at 4 cities while Plemo is at 7 with no red faces hampering him. To which I say, blame Magic Science, and I want to seehis start (remember 66), but there might also be something to it.
Doesn't matter too much in that we are still holding up fine with respect to the neighbourhood.
Snowballing Fin Viking Plemo of course is terrifying, terrifying, terrifying.
The Tarvac city he razed had 3 pop and 19 score points. Ginger suggested it must have been the cap or second city. But maybe it was actually Dreylin's capital? Is that better?
I still trust that Tarvac are competent and engaged enough to not make it easy for Plemo. Else I can only hope Commodore is near, who has never shied away from throwing himself into a runaway.

Bit of little petty domestic problems:


We whipped the settler for wheatsheep (good), but the overflow will come one turn early for the forge. We have an axe at 4h from the MS confrontation which will start losing hammers. But I'd rather start the forge than finishing the axe, hoping that MS keeps his feet still. In that case it would be better to put the OF into a WB (for scouting and fish eventually) or WC, to be completed after the forge...
So, OF into axe, WC, or WB? Or plan longterm and go with Barracks or Obelisk (I want to work priests here eventually).



I have some hope that this village is the first of its kind on the map, but I have to admit that we haven't worked it consistently all the time. The real problem though is that we have only one more cottage, which hardly ever gets worked. It's a result of our far spaced dotmap where the cities hardly ever work a non ressource tile, and the lack of city growth and workers (blame Magic Science!). The dotmap is really unlike any I've done before, but I don't really see how else we should have done it. Once we settle the eastern fish city (the settler after this one), we'll at least finally have a bit of tile sharing.



what does this worker do next? Keep a'chopping SW? FP farm/cottage? (my thinking is one farm and two cottages) Too early to start roading the gold.

[Ginger*]

Mig, you've seen most of this on discord, retyping it here for readers' benefit if there are any:

  78 food by turn 64 is fucking nutty, even by Joaoian standards, the fact that it isn't is all the more scary, i agree. However i wouldn't spend too much mental energy on what can't be controlled. The only interaction we will have with Commodore/Plemo/Tarvac before astro is tech first-tos. We're doing pretty well considering the neighborhood  

Worker at deluge should chop the granary, its current location is too awkward for immediate cottaging. I agree with the 2 cottages and a farm plan, that will bring food surplus to 8 and allow gold +3 specialists or 3mines.

Capital should clear its build queue, press 1 or 2 in the city menu to do this after having selected a build. This will save all the overflow for next turn when we can dump it into the forge. We should try to expedite a run at colossus since we're IND at MC so early.

Once we get the peak in deluge culture we should be able to see MS's second city this is important bc we need to keep track of buildings to count his culture accurately. We're expecting a turn 96 third ring pop without a library.

Our position is good, theres a lot of growth potential in the new cities, they're just slow. The core has a lot of grassland cottage potential that is untapped courtesy of whip anger. We're counting the days on that gold 

Slow build settlers/workers while unhappy to save food consumption ofc.

[klops]

retyping it here for readers' benefit if there are any

I might be quiet but enjoy your updates, thx.