I'm not sure that I follow exactly what you are saying, but hopefully after having looked at the saved game, it will make sense to me.
Barbs are now coming to attack us, because we withdrew the warrior from the choke point. Our axe can wait on the deer tile (or Zlat-W) and attack across the river any unpromoted barb warrior who arrives at the forested chokepoint for 2XP. This will rapidly get us our 10XP unit, which otherwise can take a long time. We just need to allow barbs to keep spawning.
1. Yes, you could move our warrior to the tile southeast of the lake so he can see what's coming. Just don't choke at choke point or 1NW which is also a choke point.
2. I agree with ZPV. We have never seen a Hammy or any other wb come along the western coast. AIs ALWAYS send out scouting wbs. For Hammy to have an armada, he'd have to build it in a secondary city, which is possible not likely. Plus, I doubt AIs are even coded to create armadas when they have a land route. By all means, move our scouting axe westward to see the coast a bit, but don't worry about an armada. Worry about a 10XP unit.
Does the test saved game reflect the actual location of Hammy's closest City (either his capital or his non-capital if it isn't his captial)?
Does the test saved game reflect the Barb units that we can and cannot see?
Other than Espionage Weighting, are there other possible differences between the test saved game and the real saved game that you didn't look to completely accurately sync-up, such as Culture in each City or anything else?
I can adjust things in the test saved game, as necessary, but it will help if you can think of anything that might need to be altered; thanks.
No, I didn't bother with barbs or Hammy.
The city MM is perfect except NC is 1
short in the test save.
2. Good call. I guess if we're attacking soon, then this round may be one of the final rounds of whipping before we attack, right?
Hopefully, we need population to work cottages and lower our unit costs slightly.
3. I'm not a big fan of multi-AI spending, but okay, we've made the choice so I'll try and keep an eye on that. Any tips on what part of the Espionage screen that I will need to monitor? Like, will the screen say something like "79 EPs needed for Demographic Data" and then if we have 83 EPs invested, I'd better think about re-applying some Weighting to Hammy?
Let me konw if this is understandible.
Just to play devil's advocate, how much of the coastline have you been able to monitor? For example, could a train of Galleys potentially pop out of the fog to surprise me?
None, basically. Don't forget, Hammy has been REXing up to now. He just switched to WHEOOHRN on T68. It's very complicated for him to 1) build galleys, 2) build a group head for each galley, 3) move the group head to his port city, 4) attach another unit to the group head, 5) load the galley, 6) send the galleys, especially this early in the game and especially when he doesn't regularly build attack units (group heads), but rather defensive and counter units.
In this first screenshot, we see just how far away Hammurabi is from us. Personally, I'm not a big fan of leaving the chokepoint undefended for two reasons:
a) It would be nice to be able to not worry about Barbs coming at me while I'm fighting Toku
AND
b) It would be nice to have some visibility of the water... we can see across a Lake but not if we run away from the chokepoint
I'm not sure if it will be safe to move our Warrior back onto our chokepoint Forest... it would be nice if LC could ascertain that we would be safe to move there. Worst case, we are "back to square one" and have to first move the Warrior 1W onto the GRiv just to see if there is a Barb unit to the north, then move to the chokepoint. Here's a picture of what we'd see of the Coast by being at the chokepoint:
I think you made a typo there. It should read:
a) I'm simply lusting for waves of barbs to come give our Hammy repellers lots of XP.
I recommend you put the warrior just southeast of the lake so you can see if a nasty archer is about to arrive. If so, Just send our axe to the choke point and the archer will either turn around or sucide itself at bad odds. If it's just a barb warrior or two, or the badly wounded archer, let them move onto the chokepoint and take them out, preferably with the same axe each time to get 10XP. Worst comes to worst, you poprush the axe that's getting built. Meanwhile, the worker at ZLat-1W can finish that road so axes can get to the choke point in one turn.
I will have to alter this "zero Spearmen finesse," since an extra Spearman or two in place of an Axeman or two isn't really going to hurt when capturing a City but not having any could royally screw us if Hatty decides to attack us, say via a dogpile or via being bribed by Toku.
Our Catapults are mostly in position in the east, although I'm thinking that we might want more of them before I even declare war... I would rather have overkill than come up short and be forced to attack with 3 or 4 Axemen at, say, 43% odds of winning and then end up not taking Toku's capital.
No finesse intended. I wanted a few axes in GEL for safety and in case we decided to quickly attack OSaka. Dhoom, note that GEL has a spear in the queue with 20/35h. I deliberately put the overflow into him instead of an axe because you now have the flexibility to pre-build an axe or a cat this turn, 2pop next turn, and the spear is completed on T83 either way. I agree with ZPV that we don't need more than 1 spear. It will have 3XP.
I agree with you about another cat, actually. I put axe in the GEL build, but cat is probably a better choice.
I am leaning heavily toward generating Great Scientist #2 in Delhi and #3 in NC (which should happen automatically if they tie for the time of being generated, since the order in which Cities were settled will be the tie-breaker).
If no one objects, I'm thinking of having the freedom to clear-cut any and all remaining Forests within our Cultural Borders and put them into Military Units.
I agree on the GS in Delhi and clearcutting. Please do NOT chop either deer forest, though.