[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[Zed-F]

Looks like Cairo and Yuri settled city 3 on T52 and T53 respectively. Also I think I found Bing’s city 3 settle on T46, one turn before our city 3 settle. However we will beat him to 4.

I wonder why Yuris' 3rd city was so late then. Cairo's seems pretty normal considering a Stonehenge detour, but T53 with no detours if his land is similar to mine is pretty late. Which makes me think maybe there was a detour. I wonder if he had a failed Stonehenge attempt? He is De Gaulle, so I could see him targeting it I guess.

The only other thing that makes even a lick of sense is he didn’t like his ‘mainland’ lux city plant and decided to go for an island city on city 3. If so it seems very early to do that to me, but I don’t know exactly what his lands look like, so who knows.

I do like putting a mine on the grass hill NE of the capital now while we are waiting to ferry that worker over to !new island and replace with the one (or two) coming out of Pale; it will be several turns before we can build cottages anyway, and a grass hill mine is an improvement over forested plains hill for the cap’s hammer config. Of course there might be higher priority chopping etc. to do.

[scooter]

Well, I have good news, and I have bad news.





That about sums it up. Not really where I wanted the holy city to spawn, but we did land the most prized religion on T55, which feels like a serious coup. Doing that with 0 cost to growth curve feels really nice. Hoping for a lucky spread. The Pasture and Road both complete next turn, so we'll have a spread chance in either direction for sure. It also means next turn we'll get a bit more visibility on the east island.





Part of why I did the Corn share was this - lining up Galley completion with growth to size 6 so I can go straight onto a settler next turn. I'll have the option to whip it, which I'll probably do given that I've run out of improved tiles.





The Worker comes out of Pale. I may go straight onto another honestly, especially with one Worker earmarked for overseas. It makes some sense for the city to simply pump Workers and Settlers at size 4 for a little while, at least until I get a couple cottages down.





We have the early lead.

[Zed-F]

Yeah not so great on good tiles, that city, when we want to get around to building a temple, market and bank, but hey we got the religion, so can't complain too much! Initial thoughts on Shrine -- will we need the first prophet for that, or for something else? There's not a lot of other commerce sources so shrine might be more valuable from that perspective this game (plus chance to spread) as compared with PB73.

EDIT: And there is SD with a city 4 plant, keeping up pretty well.

[scooter]

Holy city border pop gave me some fresh vision. No seafood in sight still which is a bummer, though we do see Horse. I placed Yellow as it's obviously a pretty ideal spot. I'll just have to ensure I'm not going to orphan a seafood this way, as there's of course potential that I'll need to be able to settle SE of the Cow. Scout onto Galley next turn, then dropped off the turn after that.

Yeah not so great on good tiles, that city, when we want to get around to building a temple, market and bank, but hey we got the religion, so can't complain too much! Initial thoughts on Shrine -- will we need the first prophet for that, or for something else? There's not a lot of other commerce sources so shrine might be more valuable from that perspective this game (plus chance to spread) as compared with PB73.

Yeah, I wasn't necessarily thinking of a huge religious push this game other than it would be nice to have the happy and/or culture. However, it is true that the gold might be nice, and there's def a chance this is a high-ish city count game as smaller islands like this have a way of resulting in higher city-per-land levels. So maybe. That said, it's challenging to spread your religion overseas if you don't intend to open borders with folks, so there's that issue too.

[Zed-F]

We don’t have a prima facia reason not to open borders with other PRO folks, though, and opening borders is good from a diplo point of view to keep borders demilitarized. So eventually some effort toward spreading religion might be reasonable to pursue. Agreed that it doesn’t seem like an immediate priority, and I doubt we want to go all-in on monk economy this game; there are a lot of things to put hammers toward and we don’t get discounts on religious buildings. But a judicious investment could get us a shrine and some amount of free spreading, which could be worthwhile even if we don’t make a ton of effort to maximize it quickly.

[scooter]

I don't see anything that convinces me to change yellow dot, so I'm planning to settle it T61. It's really tempting to make this the Moai city, but I'm not sure it has enough food unfortunately. I triple whipped Unta. I hesitated in doing it, but honestly it makes some of the tile sharing easy, so it seems fine. I'm mining the 3-way shareable grass hill with Ehrlitan, and then I'll ferry a worker over to pasture the Cow. It appears we have more vertical-ish islands east of this island with what appears to be a passage parallel with Yellow. I'll use my Scout to get some sight on this coast before actually dropping the settler.


I missed a second screenshot of the north, but at end of turn both Aren and Ehrlitan were size 2 and building WBs. The plan is to single-whip them both. This will give both work boats about a half-dozen turns to scout islands to the west and east of Aren, and then return in time to hook the seafood when borders pop. If I can find another spot quickly, I can get another settler moving too. Yellow Dot will boost our trade routes up to 3c apiece, so it should be an instant boon economically, so I see no reason to not keep pushing cities and teching towards Currency. I'll probably slip in Archery first though, as I'm going to want some PRO Archers in islands as we're nearing the point where other players could show up with units on boats.

[Commodore]

A plus side of this taking so long to get going is that I'm discovering this along with you guys.

[Zed-F]

Yellow dot definitely doesn’t have enough food for Moai. Pale is a much better location for it.

I really hope we can find metal luxes in some reasonable place nearby. If the luxes are all hidden down by the South Pole, like our marble, that might be awkward.

We can’t quite finish pottery this turn it looks like — a shame since the capital will need to regrow and it might be good to grow on a granary. Maybe also in city 3 & 4 after whipping? We do need to get some boats out scouting for new city locations (and for city 3’s food as you mentioned) so prioritizing those seems like the right call.

[scooter]

We can’t quite finish pottery this turn it looks like — a shame since the capital will need to regrow and it might be good to grow on a granary.

Yeah I had some regret after playing the turn because there's some decent overflow (15h or so) from the capital whip, and it would have been nice to dump that into the Granary. I think I should have delayed the whip a turn for this reason. But yes Granary will start immediately. I may just 1T a warrior (I need one anyway) which will let me start a Granary right away. Just a shame to not use the overflow better.

A plus side of this taking so long to get going is that I'm discovering this along with you guys.

Ah, so this means you are just as unclear as me as to where I can find some metal happy and/or stone.

[Zed-F]

I guess we could put those overflow hammers into a third workboat that won't just get used to net seafood in a few turns, so we have a better idea of where to send follow-up settlers to find those things. Not sure that's better than warrior + starting on a granary but it's a reasonable alternative.