Cornflakes Goes Classical ... or Quantum?!

[Cornflakes]

Lost the 96% full health chariot vs axe-on-wines thankfully my sentry chariot had healed up to 1.8 and the axe had been knocked down to 1.3 and the sentry won the follow-up at 97%.

And … fresh axe incoming in the east two more chariots completing in 2 turns to replace the losses.

[Magic Science]

. Civilizations always triumph in the end.

And was Planck producing a Confucian Monastery for its first building? Interesting.

[Cornflakes]

2nd, after Granary. This will likely be a border city, and I want to push culture out to 3rd ring quickly since I’ll be up against Madrassa culture.

[Cornflakes]

Lost another brand new chariot to a 96% axe on flatland. But this wave of barbs is now defeated.

[Cornflakes]

And 1 turn later I get 3 axes, 2 spears, and 2 warriors on my borders. I’m not complaining, I’m more wondering how the rest of the world could be handling similar invasions with no military. Commodore finally has a military comparable to mine according to the graphs, but it does not look like Scooter has anything except warriors and archers yet

[Cornflakes]

Yuri declared war on scooter this turn. I have scouts in Yuri's and Scooter's territories but unfortunately they are each about as far away from their border area as they can be at the moment so no war correspondent. If I remember correctly though I think that I saw each of them complete a settler in the last couple turns and so I suspect that the war has something to do with a settler race ... and Yuri will have the upper hand since scooter still has not connected copper for some reason (although he is showing horses now on the trade screen)

   

Apparently scooter also researched Currency because gold is now also shown on the trade screen. Even though scooter has Currency and is Financial, we still have a slight edge in gpt. I'm still undecided regarding my next tech target. I could get currency in 8t (+8gpt assuming I keep OB), but I get just as much boost from waiting a couple turns and finishing the two libraries at Aether and Stoichiometry so I'm deferring my research for another 5 turns ... at which point I will have enough to burn through Code of Laws + Civil Service (Bureaucracy for +13 gpt + 7hpt, likely 50% more by the time I reach it) so I'm leaning that way. Or I might choose to pick up Currency first for the extra arrow bonus on CoL in addition to the extra trade route boost.

My population is now double the rival best according to the victory screen (40% vs. 20% for rival best). But I know that scooter and Yuri each have a settler on the map and Commodore has Pyramids now for Representation happiness so I expect everyone to catch up in population soon. I'm undecided on my next settler timing. Tentatively I'm planning to get a couple more chariots out to fog bust and zone defense first since axes continue swarming in from the tundra. That should time out with Currency trade routes canceling maintenance on the new cities. So vertical growth for another 10 or so turns, then whip out a round of settlers and double the city count within a couple turns.

   

   

Demographics include 2 chariots completed on the turn roll and a Phalanx that is still not updated on the graph delay. Rival best power is Commodore so it doesn't look like the Scooter/Yuri war is a war of elimination. I'm not the slightest bit concerned about Commodore's power, I'm quite pleased to have the Greek Phalanx as my defensive trump card. Planck is settled on a hill so Phalanx get odds on axes and overwhelming odds on chariots and Horse Archers. I'm farming Planck to avoid the temptation for pillaging cottages/villages/towns and my long-term goal is to maintain a friendly-but-defensively-firm posture towards Commodore (yep, I remember sniping his axe ... but friendly posture from now on).

[Cornflakes]

   

I turned on research and I should have Currency in 5 more turns after accounting for the riverside gold mine that I'll start working next turn. the Gold will quell the anger in Stoichiometry, and the Forge will allow it to grow up to size 10. I should have enough gold banked at this point to burn all the way through Currency > Code of Laws > Civil Service for Bureaucracy.

I am aware that I need to begin pumping out settlers but at the same time I don't want maintenance to impede tech pace to Civil Service. My plan is to finish Aether's Forge while it grows to size 12, then slow-built settlers pretty much indefinitely until my land is filled up. Possibly supplementing from other cities with whips off of lumbermills (continuously working all cottages). I have 3 workers improving Planck now which will be ready to swarm east to the pinned city in the north around the time that Aether can complete the settler. I'll farm the floodplain bringing food surplus to 6, and then probably watermill that whole grassland/plains area (farming tiles initially to grow quickly and whip in infrastructure).

Maxwell finally received the free Confucianism spread this turn. Even though Stoichiometry is like 3-4 tiles further distance from the holy city it managed to get its free spread in 5 turns while Maxwell at minimum distance took 30 turns

   

I'll finish this post with the county of improvements, buildings, and barb kills, and also the demographics now that I've turned on research. I have 2 lumbermills and will have 2 more finished and worked next turn. I'm somewhat experimenting with minimal slavery and somewhat following in the footsteps of my PB63 game where I didn't adopt Slavery for the first time until T101 (except that as SPI I can still use slavery intermittently).

   

   

[Cornflakes]

Thanks for the reports!  I'm just catching up now and really curious to see how this game ends up evolving, with the highly-unusual (for this site) settings.  I'm too afraid of spoilers to say or ask more about the gamestate, but I do have a bunch of thoughts about your latest physics/philosophy post, so I'm spoiling them here for ease of skipping.

I'll start responding to some of this piece-by-piece:

What is time? Or more directly, what definition of time allows for time to be reversible?

My understanding:  There's no such definition because "time" isn't reversible ... any more than "length" or "width" is reversible.  In classical or quantum mechanics, all events/interactions are in principle "reversible in time" - the way your car is "reversible in length."  That is:  You can turn the car around so it's parked back-to-front in the same direction in which it was previously front-to-back, and it will still be a functional car.  (Actually if you really reverse it in just one dimension, you'll end up with a British car with the driver's side on the right, and I vaguely recollect that if you take it to extremes at the quantum level, you may end up with an anti-matter car, so please don't try testing this with some kind of magic one-dimensional-reversal ray.)

But if you take the case of say a drop from a leaky faucet falling into the sink and splattering, and you run the whole scenario backward as if with a rewind button on a movie, and calculate the momentum and kinetic energy of each of the (various other interacting molecules and) zillion tiny water droplets which (as you watch them backward) happen to be converging on the same spot in your sink, where they smash together into a single big drop, bouncing off the sink together, exactly counteracting one another's lateral kinetic forces with the help of cohesive forces from hydrogen bonds, and consequently rebound up to your faucet, slowed by the force of gravity until they come to a stop right up against the faucet's edge where adhesive and cohesive forces keep them from falling again, you'll find all the numbers add up and the physics works with no problems.  It's just that such an event would be so wildly improbable in the universe as we understand and experience it, with every molecule moving exactly right, that we know it would "never" happen that way in the real world.  We make our predictions on the basis of this understanding and experience, and they keep turning out to be right - in our continuing understanding and experience.  If enough sinks and nearby water droplets keep existing for long enough (don't ask me how many googolplexes of sink-years would be needed; I couldn't even calculate it) eventually some "reverse drips" will actually occur.  They're so unbelievably, impossibly rare though (on a macroscopic scale and/or over any significant timeframe at least) that we can ignore them for all practical purposes.  (Also for virtually all impractical purposes.)

This makes sense. Thanks for the explanation, I missed the key understanding that "reversible" was referring not to time but to the event.

Responses to the rest of your post coming ... eventually

[Cornflakes]

Slight change of plans with my research:

   

I paused research for 3 turns after Currency in order to finish the Great Scientist for an academy (worth 18 bpt now, and 30 bpt by the time I reach Bureaucracy). I decided to skip Code of Laws in order to hit Civil Service via Feudalism for a couple reasons:
• I'm not planning to run Caste System any time soon
• CoL is not on the line to Guilds or Rifles, which I'm prioritizing, and which will therefore same me 500 beakers.
• Skipping CoL blocks Philosophy on the GScientist bulb tree, thus opening up Paper and Chemistry [and later Astronomy and Electricity].

I'm tentatively planning around a deep beeline down the middle of the tech tree. This game will be decided on the battlefield. And by skipping the line from CoL > Philosophy > Nationalism > Constitution > Economics > Corporation [> Democracy > Steam Power > Railroad] ... I can play for an early military edge with Rifles + Cannon. And possibly leapfrog a generation of military by going Rifling for immediate defensibility while generating a stream of Great Scientists, then bulb my way to Physics and research Artillery + Rocketry for artillery and SAM infantry (18str each) and Electricity > Fission for nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons do not require any of the corporation line, nor Assembly Line > Combustion. While everyone else chases the corporations, I can power through the middle of the tree and then build 9 nukes for the win

Although Commodore is tempting me with Pyramids in a border city ...

   

I almost went for the music artist to bomb Planck but that would probably just promote Commodore to go all-out eliminating the threat. I'm contemplating a knights blitz though ... construction isn't a prerequisite on the Guilds line so I'm considering just straight up brute forcing it with Feudalism > Civil Service (Bureaucracy) > Machinery > HBR > Guilds. Commodore has a settler en route for a 3rd border city around that roaded cows. Bam, Bam, Bam, 3-city elimination before he can even respond

I have 7 lumbermills now and more on the way, so Machinery is actually an economic tech (I'll have 8 at Aether which will get Bureaucracy + Academy boost).

[Cornflakes]

Someone researched HBR now that I can see gold thanks to Currency I can make a more educated guess but I haven’t been checking the tech screen every turn since we’ve been playing so fast. Commodore has a surplus of only 5gpt so he is either stagnating or using Rep specialists for research. He appears to be setting up a comfortable border city in the south based on his settler movement this turn (screenshot next turn after he settles). Yuri has 199g saved and in the +20’s max tax and HBR was definitely research within 5 turns. Scooter has about 2-3 turns of gold in the bank and a power bump that just updated on the graphs. I’ll put Scooter down as the proud HBR owner, with impetus being Yuri’s DoW around 10 turns ago.

I lost my eastern scout to a barb but I finally freed up my sentry chariot with a couple other chariots now on barb duty so I’ll send him north to spectate on the Yuri/Scooter border.