PH12: Men in Tights

As I already said on the thread next door, though my RL troubles are far from being finished, now it has nothing to do with here.
So civ we go again

May I be back on deck, just behind Ralph (don't worry Ralph, I don't bite ) who's already there ?

Yeah, we're on the lookout for rolo, too ~ if he's not got it by tomorrow, then RJ will be UP and pawelo will have his chance ~

also, i'll be OoP starting tomorrow evening GMT until late sun nite so you'll hve to carry on w/o me

Roster:
pholkhero
Refar >> just played
Meiz >> swapped
r_rolo >>UP NOW
Ralph_Jackson >> on deck
pawelo

Ok .... will play one of the PH today... ( not sure if this one... )

This means ( of course ) that I got it .... ( sorry for taking it so late: my computer was laggy yesterday.... didn't wanted to have a nice bluescreen )

I must say before the turnset that we need to stop for a while and think what we are going to do next.... I think that we are being too much sucessful for our good.

But first things first....

My first impressions of the game:

We already have our 3 biggies clearly defined and in some turns the budha AP will be done. We had a artist in Locxley, but IMHO we should always help the weakest city in a cultural one ,so I sent him to Gisborne:


As predicted AP was online... I voted for Boudi, that became AP resident


We got a GSpy as well... as our big cultural cities will be the ones with more spies I decided to do a S. Yard in Gisborne


Even the game reckons that we're going pretty well:


The big moment of the turnset:

We robbed Eng to Charlie and CS to Victoria....

But that had a side effect: we now are #2 in score, after Charlie.... Vicky is having troubles against JC and she lost a lot of units ( AI simply don't know how to use Samurai..... ) and that combined with our big jump in score due to this 2 big juicy techs was enough to put her behind.....

Now the painful part of the deal:

Ouch... and the bastard wouldn't give us calendar after this magnanimous gesture ( hey , we can ask... )

Can you say OP?


And Charlie decided finally to move his SoD.... ( always thinked that he would DoW JC.... dogpile effect maybe ? )


Wash decide to negotiate what he didn't wanted to give:

And that putted us in a hairy situation for this SG: we don't have nothing to steal....

Seeing that our only milking cow was researching a tech that we already had, I decided to cut the problem by the root:

The stupid decided to research Optics ....

One more wonder for the ride....

and a not that good thing

Boudi is broken ... and to add the Incan capital now is Tiwanaku.

And this happened in my last turn:

It was so tempting to join a dogpile.... but it would make us even powerful and joining a dogpile with the big war dogs in the game doesn't suit the SG theme very nicely.... And BTW Charlie captured the AP city

Regards

We are being too much sucessful for our own good.... How are we going to live with only charlie as cash cow ( and we could even be faced with a situation where we can't steal from no one ,a big problem for a EE )...

this leads us to next question: what are we going to do if that happens?

And another question.... what are going to do to power our tech shop? Vicki is clearly aiming for lib, Charlie ... well, who need caravels in a pangea game where the circumnavigation bonus is already taken?

P.S Can we start pushing the culture bar up? we're having some

I think for a while - where there is nothing to steal - we should distribute the -points evenly to everyone.
Sure, some of those will ge just a loss, as we will never use them on lower civs, but they will give us passive benefits, like knowing tech targets, visibility... Knowledge is power

I suggest we lower our EP slider to 50% and raise culture to 20%. This leaves us with positive cash flow. I would hate to miss some free Great Artist event or something else...

Now that we don't have much to steal, I would rather build cathedrals ASAP in our big three.

Remember that even while Charlemagne is researching bad techs, he will most likely trade with his best friends. So he has other ways to get techs for us to steal

Ok Got it, will have a look tonight and play report tomorrow.

Ralph

good turns rolo, but i don't know what we can do. I honestly didn't foresee us being number 1 or 2 in the game. again, i don't mind if we dial back EPs a bit, as long as it's not into science.

Are WE heading for liberalism too? we still seem okay as far as techs go, but perhaps Gunpowder would do well for some protection.

Roster:
pholkhero
Refar
Meiz
r_rolo >> just played
Ralph_Jackson >> UP NOW
pawelo >> on deck

I choosed Education exactly because of this dual need: it opens both guns and Lib... but I would not worry with power for a while: we're building castles and AI respects castles a lot ( they have a pretty high soldier value for the hammer spending + 25% spy points ( main reason for building them ) + 1 trade route )

OK,

Well following our variant rules I assign all EP’s to Charlemagne but as we don’t need them dial it down to 10% and culture to 90%.

A quick Whack a Mole for the odd specialist the governor adds if you are not looking and we are away..

Then for a while its largely building stuff and pressing enter waiting for Charlemagne to finish optics so we can steal it..

Which we do and then gift it away.

In the end Boudica can’t hold on anymore and vassalises to Fred the Greek ending the wars on our continent.

We also spread Hinduism to Barnsdale to complete our religion spread.

But after this an opportunity arises which looks quite cunning to me
In the crap shoot that is what GP will we pop we get lucky and get a Prophet. He will partially bulb Divine Right and as no-one else is researching it even with science at 0% we have chance and a fourth religion would be very beneficial so we go for it.

As we are doing this we also get to steal Guilds

And build the U of Sankore

Finally it comes off and we have Islam which ought to give us a significant boost with more temples and cathedrals available.

We need to dial up espionage again now as we have burnt a loit of points in stealing from Charlemagne.

Ralph

We have Ankor wat so priest is not that bad... Depends of course on where the gov assigned it...

Refar said:

We have Ankor wat so priest is not that bad... Depends of course on where the gov assigned it...

Click to expand...

Yeah, if you want to break some variants...

I forgot

good turns RJ ~ nice work on nabbing us another religion; every little bit certainly helps a bunch! we just need to be diligent in spreading them and building those temples. Gisborne should probably get as many cathedrals as we have religions, with the other two getting them to pick up the slack. When i checked last Gisborne was WAY behind on culture, so we need to give it special attention.

Roster:
pholkhero >> on deck
Refar
Meiz
r_rolo
Ralph_Jackson >> just played
pawelo >> UP NOW

And got this one too
I'm going to work out some more culture for Gisborne, unless we want all GA bombed there.

Quiet turnset, basically building up religion and spreading islam.

Some highlights:



On the inherited turn I found a Great Spy in Sherwood. Checked for advise, found none, settled the guy.
Also, I set 40% spending on the espionnage.

JC asked us to DoW Washy, Washy asked us to DoW JC - negative modifiers and nothing has changed...



Fredo came by and asked for this trade. It's a huge problem - I should've stolen Banking As per rules, I accept.

Few turns later:



Vicky has just finished it
Btw, with our DR assistance, Fredo has already got Nationalism. I set major part of our Esp points on him, the remaining part going on Vicky to rebuild what was necessary to steal Education.

A spy is stationed in Tiwanaku (since one turn only), and a Great Spy is available in Loxley for bombing Fredo if you judge it useful (I somehow would like to have this Taj in Loxley or Sherwood ) - you have my vote.



Nice, and very much appreciated, boost to our budget.

And here is the state of the world, AD 1400:



My 0,50$ :
- Spy-Bomb Fredo and steal Nationalism asap
- Build Taj
- Continue the religion build-up
- Steal Eco from Vicky as soon as she gets to it

Fun to be back

No Spy-Bombs in a EE please, really - we can make ~250 /turn - so a Spybomb is worth ~ 10 to 15 turns only. Barnsdale should get our next Scotland Yard (Which will outperform a Spy-bomb in just something over ~50 turns).

Also: We can't steal nothing from Fredo, as he's below us in score... Same for Vicky. Also Washington is the Guy with Nationalism... And he's below us as well... The only one we can steal from is Charlie, and right now he does not have nothing worthwhile... (I.e. Nothing at all)

Taj Mahal is allways nice to have, but not crucial for our strategy, so no need to break the Variant rules to get it

I think we should up espionage spending again - many cities are not even running Spys - Barnsdale for example has already and grows further into Unhappines, yet continues working farms...

The techs that are coming will be more expensive, so we should build up someting like 3000 on Charlie... It will be crucial to steal Constitution for Jails as soon as it comes up, as otherwise the AI will build Jails first and greatly up the reducing our discounts...

Other notes on the -issue - perhaps a good whipping round is in order - at least where the overpopulation- is rampant. Also some of the +food tiles should bve replaced by something more usefull - Watermills for example, as we cant run othe rspecialists than spy, our options to "chew-up" surplus food are limited...
(Edit: sorry - only Barnsdale is really in unhappiness right now, but Nottingham and Loxley get there if we up spending - which we might need at some point.)

Uhh... I can see some (settling first Gspy instead of Scotland yard) and some (EP's on lower civs, stealing from Victoria).

Oops...
Sorry

Btw, what would be a pholk game if we were to win it ?

if only fox were here to whip you properly pawelo good turns otherwise ~ i shall adjust our EPs as necessary, but i *think* we can build taj ~ what rule would we be breaking???

btw, i've got it and will play tonight or tomorrow.