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[SPOILERS] scooter's Rule of Three
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(December 18th, 2024, 14:45)T-hawk Wrote:(December 18th, 2024, 13:11)scooter Wrote: Yuris has decided to pump culture into Frankfurt in an effort to take the Pigs from me. Not really what I meant by that. There's not giving up in a macro sense, and there's not picking losing battles. Cultural control over a contested tile vs a Creative player is a lost battle. You either cede it or build some units and fix it that way. He already tried the unit method which resulted in me compromising and pulling my city back 2 tiles when he declared war and moved units forward. Despite this, he's now pouring more hammers into a cultural battle he cannot win long-term, though he will earn himself a few turns of it at least. All he's really doing is ensuring we are both spending hammers on religious and cultural buildings rather than both expanding. His right to do so of course. Reality is he looks more squeezed for land than me, and his best path forward is probably scoring 3 razes in one direction or the other, and his other neighbor is running a 4CC. So I get it. But it is annoying.
I feel like Yuris is testing me.
 Just look at this. Incredibly brave to do this to the person you declared on. I thought pretty hard about this. Declaring right here surely would have sent me either 2W or 1S (this is me tempting Ref to tell me I would have teleported across the map), which would have left me 1 movement point to kill a settler. It would have cost me the Chariot of course, but that's a really good trade. There was a tiny part of me hoping he'd settle something stupid and I could snipe it. As if that was not enough.  I guess he correctly figured if I could pass up a settler, I would pass up a worker. Remember this, Yuris. Particularly when I plant this city in the middle of all of this. I sort of regret not killing the settler if I'm being honest because I simply do not believe he's going to give me long-term peace. Fake-edit: As I was writing this post, it occurred to me I probably could have razed Essen the turn after that screenshot had I stayed in place as it was empty. I guess I do not know for sure that it was empty on T76. I wonder if I could have declared on T74, teleported next to it, then razed. Hard to say. Ooof, that's a tough opportunity missed. For those who want to teleport rules theorize, I staarted T74 inside Essen which was empty at the time. It just did not occur to me to try.  Settled States of Matter for the classic solid-liquid-gas trio. I dumped the chop into immediate 1T walls. This is not super ideal, but a walled city with cultural defenses on a hill is tough to crack, so that will help tremendously. By the way, Frankfurt added a Library too, and my earlier call of Temple was wrong, it was a Monastery. So he's at 6 culture/turn there (religion + Monument + Monastery + Library). I chopped in my UB which got me to 5c/turn, and I'm chop/whipping a Monastery next which will get me to 7c/turn. Will probably add a Monument too since it's cheap, and the city is way behind on tile improvements thanks to all of this, which means whipping away pop is best anyway. As I said, annoying, but I will get the pigs back. But it may take a few turns longer than planned. I actually do not really know how he acquired that many hammers so quickly. Well, I do. Look at all the forests thata no longer exist there.  This is an Events Are Neutral situation as I do not border Cornflakes and will not in the age of melee units.
December 19th, 2024, 02:48
(This post was last modified: December 19th, 2024, 02:53 by RefSteel.)
 (December 18th, 2024, 23:14)scooter Wrote: Declaring right here surely would have sent me either 2W or 1S (this is me tempting Ref to tell me I would have teleported across the map), which would have left me 1 movement point to kill a settler. Ha - I'll bite! I had to look over several screenshots to be sure though. In fact if I'm accurately reading the borders (e.g. I guess Berlin has popped borders to 4th ring?) and distances from your screenies, the Chariot would have teleported to the jungle 1W of the Settler (and therefore, yes, still had a movement point with which to kill it) ... unless there was an enemy unit (even a noncombatant one) already on that tile. If that tile contained a barb, your chariot would instead have teleported 1S as you (half) expected. If it contained a Yuris unit ... uh ... let's see if I can remember this correctly.... Quote:I wonder if I could have declared on T74, teleported next to it, then razed. Hard to say. Ooof, that's a tough opportunity missed. For those who want to teleport rules theorize, I staarted T74 inside Essen which was empty at the time. It just did not occur to me to try. Okay, right, so. Again assuming Berlin has fourth ring borders and Munich second ring, if you declared at the beginning of T74 with your chariot inside the city of Essen, it would have teleported ... yeah, WSW to the plains tile (1NW of the Settler) with full city-killing movement left. Unless an enemy unit was there! Still, that would just jump the chariot to the jungle 1W of the Settler, still in city-killing range, and if a unit was there the chariot probably winds up on the ivory (out of range, but you could Settler snipe) except ... well, you get the idea. Executive summary: Either of your suggested teleportation attacks would probably have worked, but teleportation results can get really unpredictable in the fog of war! (December 19th, 2024, 02:48)RefSteel Wrote:Quote:I wonder if I could have declared on T74, teleported next to it, then razed. Hard to say. Ooof, that's a tough opportunity missed. For those who want to teleport rules theorize, I staarted T74 inside Essen which was empty at the time. It just did not occur to me to try. Thanks for the explanations! I'm sure missing out on a chance to raze a city from a player showing hostility towards me totally won't come back to haunt me.  First to 8 cities. Next couple cities will be a bit more of a slog to get online. City locations are almost entirely determined by "where is the hill" by the way. In any case, CRE makes this spot viable because I'll begin pasturing the Pig right when it enters borders.  Oh hey, two things complete next turn at the same time. I'm sure that's nothing.  Had briefly forgotten about my free shock promo and was pleasantly surprised.  Demos are recovering and getting back to respectable.  In fact, the field has tightened considerably from Cornflakes' time as a seeming runaway. Commodore is lagging pretty heavily. Turn pace is so absurd that I briefly wondered if we could finish before the new year. Ending in Jan/Feb seems entirely possible. I'll play this kind of game (small game, fast pace, 3-city elim) any time. It's great. It does lead to a sloppier game, but that's not all bad either.
How much of the jungle do you want? I did love creative pick for the hill city placement, but not seeing a grassland pig being improved immediately has me wondering considering you don't show this as a border city (although I realize situations can change). Just sad pig.
(December 19th, 2024, 13:58)Mjmd Wrote: How much of the jungle do you want? I did love creative pick for the hill city placement, but not seeing a grassland pig being improved immediately has me wondering considering you don't show this as a border city (although I realize situations can change). Just sad pig. Well, how much do I want, and how much can I get are different things entirely. What we really wanted was the Gems, but I've been pessimistic for a bit that it could happen. I left this out of last turn's report because it was mostly taken for Tarkeel, but:  The short answer is Olympic Medals is a border city, and I always suspected it might become one even if I hoped for more. That Commodore city is surely on the plains hill, which means we're looking at second ring borders there that just popped. Realistically, he is going to get those Gems if Cornflakes isn't even closer, which he might be. This sucks, and it's the other half of our barb-free bargain. When you've got to deal with jungle, you just cannot move as quickly. I'm trying not to fret about available land though, because the math changes wildly if someone simply loses 3 cities.  We have the Great Library. Also of note, we have our first Town on the floodoplains 1S of the capital. We were hardcore about getting these floodplains cottages down and worked every turn ASAP to (mild) detriment of growth curve, and the payoff is quickly coming online. This city will be a monster. Academy due in 19T if I do nothing, and more like 12T if I work some scientists to speed it up. Most likely I'll mix in some specialist turns as I grow the city now. National Epic probably makes sense here sooner than later.
Let me explain the turn pace for you this way. Check this out. Timestamps are in my local timezone.
![[Image: HrmAaVO.png]](https://i.imgur.com/HrmAaVO.png) What are the things you see here? 1) Essentially 2 full turns played in 2 hours 2) On two different occasions the next player in the turn order logged in to play their turn before the previous player was even able to log out. (This happens all the time in this game.) This is not a cherry-pick. Today is Thursday, and if you scan PBSpy, you'll see blocks like this every day this week. Honestly we may as well just all stay logged in all day.
I played 9 turns yesterday.
 Kicked off today by settling Meals here. This gets me to 9 cities while everyone else is on 7. My fertile cottage valley around the capital is funding all of this pretty comfortably at the moment.  Finally got a Horse Archer up here to kill this Warrior. And uh.  Well that's annoying. To make matters worse, none of them suicided end of turn, so this is going to be a game of whack-a-mole to kill them all without further issues. This leads me to the next thing which is that I think it's worth considering doing some backfilling of city sites soonish. Candidate Number One is Yellow Dot shown here. Fishing village with a very strong food surplus suggests a possible whipping post here, and it's got the food surplus to make that Incense tile pretty nice, which would more or less pay for the city itself.  Over here is Red Dot. It gives me an eastern port, but also one that is safer in that it can be approached by only one water tile, so parking a couple boats NE of it could protect it from boating. Similar to Yellow, the solid food surplus makes this ideal. Again, we are FIN, so I don't complain about food + coast.  There's also the middle north which has a couple solid foods, but we can't see quite enough to make super intelligent dotmaps yet. I was hoping to explore this with the HA, but that unit will be occupied for a few chasing down Warriors.  Finally, in foreign news, Cornflakes looks to be about to claim the Gems, and he's already got Feudalism. I did move onto the hill to see better, and the Commodore/Cornflakes borders are definitely touching quite a bit here. For our part, Feudalism is where I think we need to generally head next, although Music detour at some point to keep us from getting the Artist sniped. I could see a GA coming in the next dozen-ish turns to get us into at minimum HR, possibly more. Or the Artist could be used aggressively, hard to say. Barbarians have been messing with our new southwest cities. One showed up at Olympic Medal's Rice (dead now), and another showed up at the rice for Meals as well this past turn, so I'm dealing with that. All OK though overall. As for overall macro, part of why I'm considering the backfill sites is I sort of wonder if that might be enough. We're at 9 cities now, and there's easily room for 4ish backfill spots plus 1-2 Jungle spots that won't be heavily contested. And it really feels like this game is careening towards some action around Knights. So I sort of wonder if I should just try to get to 14-15 cities and then get ready for fireworks. I don't know exactly what shape/form those fireworks will take on, but it really feels inevitable. Maybe this is a misread for me, but borders starting to touch and the upside of an entire empire disappearing may prove too tempting? |
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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
