Nobels for Violence

[fiddlesticks]

Turn 40 - Switch to settler. Worker to quarry Marble. My plan would be to produce the settler and then taget Masoleum after we have the 15% bonus from marble.
Morroco scout escorting worker home.
SW scout to continue SW near Prague.
SE Scarcher continues south

Turn 41 - Pacal completes Stonehenge in Palenque (first military target now I think).
Vatican City seeks a new Natural Wonder
Pike to Kilimanjaro
Warrior to home to heal and then clear barb camp near Stockholm with archer. Allow connecting horses safely.
SE Scarcher finds barb warrior, but altitude training saves him from a hit.

Turn 42 - Barb hand-axe near Stockholm. Get Pike altitude training. Scarcher finds barb camp in SE.

Turn 43 - Prague targets camp S of Palenque. Pike attacks barb warrior (too many barbs near Stockholm). Scout trespass near La Venta hoping barb will steal worker there. Scarcher finds ruin two tiles from Assurbanipal's borders. Scout with worker finds barb camp (archer) with a worker.

Turn 44 - Vatican CIty targets camp near Chitzen Itza. Pike kills barb warrior. Scarcher pops useless barb camp ruin. Finds Kyzyl first (30g).

Turn 45 - Kyzyl targets camp close by Scarcer to clear. Sigtuna grows to 3, working hill. Stockhom grows to horses. Work that tile (2f 1h) rather than copper (2f 2g).
Writing done. Start Calendar so we'll have that when settler gets to sugar coast location. I'm OK with missing Ivory since we'll get that soon after taking Palenque.

Turn 46 - Trade Embassies with Assur, Pacal and Ahmad. Scarcher to Accuracy 1. POP Kyzyl (almost forgot).

Turn 47 - Stockholm has marble. Settler done start Mausoleum (14 turns). Pike to accompany Settler to sugar coast. Start mining grassland copper. Scout finds ruin island south of Prague

Turn 48 - fighting barbs

Turn 49 - Clear barb camp near Stockholm. Hand Axe spawned turn 48. Worker and scout almost home. Sigtuna grows to horses so work that rather than the hill.

Turn 50 - Need to be careful with our Scarcher in Kyzyl. Barb warrior spawned and hit it so hp low. May need to heal before clearing camp. Recommend chop to speed Mausoleum. GPT is -6, so Mausoleum will help a lot. Faith is cruising at 6 per turn now. Barb spearman just came up from the camp near Sigtuna so we'll have to retreat workers. I should have cleared it with the pikeman earlier. Sorry about that. On the bright side it might be a good opportunity to move a worker down to Sigtuna.

I'd suggest taking the Pike down to clear the camp next to Sigtuna and then to the camp targeted by Prague (we should PoP Prague). Once the spearman is taken care of I'd take our Warrior and Archer over to clear the camp with the worker to the east of Stockholm.

@raider980 is up.

 

[raider980]

Ok, pausing for a State of the Game discussion after the first round. Fiddlesticks, FYI, we decided to pause after each round (and may need to do it more often) to discuss plans going forward. We did this because we discovered in past games that sometimes we were playing at odds with each other. So hopefully we can get on the same page with these discussions.

Below are some discussion points I gleaned from the previous page. Feel free to add more. A summary of the below is:

• Social Policies. Tradition opener next? Then finish Liberty?
• Gren's report table. How did you envision filling out the bribe, GS and GMu part?
• Great Person strategy.
• Victory Condition. When do we need to decide this?

No hurry, but I would also like for us to have a discussion about Rationalism. Last game I wasted an SP picked because I recklessly assumed we would be closing out Rationalism for Internet (or maybe Globalism, for WC control).

I also thought that keeping this sort (or something similar, I really didn't spent weeks designing this) of small table in every transition post would be handy. Obviously some of the info here is time/turn dependant but for the sake of clarity keeping the same format is useful.


--------------------------
cities 1
workers 3
NW 5
--------------------------
Ancient
------------------------
bribe ---
GS ---
GMu ---
--------------------------

• How early are we going to start fighting? I remember last game you all thought we should have started earlier.

• How many cities before NC? We have so much space.

Since we are Sweden, what is our GP strategy? I vote for building all Guilds early, and giving them all away, except maybe GE (and the first two GPr). 90 influence is serious, and we have already agreed to limit our use of GS. Maybe once we have all the CS under our sway, we can consider theming? If we close out Patronage, we will have more GP than we know what to do with.

As for VC, my vote is for later DOM, not really starting until the UU unlocks. Maybe shift to CV if that looks smoother, after clearing the continent.

Also, beetle posted several rule related comments at the bottom of P. 1.

Finally, cities.

• As much as I love settling on luxes, especially worthless calendar luxes, the sugar spot is on a lake, not coast. And it gives up an Ele, Cow, and access to the Bananas for a Bison and Fish (could we even build a work boat on a small lake?). I think the spot one tile SW is best.
• Ashur is going to be a problem. He's a city spammer (not as bad as Hiawatha but still). Should we settle the two cities toward him next?
• Or go for Uluru and the other coastal city next - those are very far away, like 12-15 turns far.
• Maus of Hal will take 10 more turns. Are we going to have enough time to found all those cities before the spots are taken? We may need to delay NC quite a lot.

 

[vadalaz]

My 2c on the next 50 turns:

- I'd buy the Copper tile in Sigtuna and work that, have the city build an Archer - grow to pop 4, buy the Sheep and build a Settler for the Gold spot - finish Granary - Stable if the timing's right - build other stuff. A worker needs to go chop that Dyes forest soon so the borders are more likely to expand there.

- Sugar city will have three forest chops so it can build something good quickly. One option is a Caravan which I'd send to Ashur, then start the usual Monument Granary etc. Chopping out a worker or a military unit is also good.

- Stockholm tries for Mausoleum, then Stoneworks and Settlers with units/caravan in between, claim whatever spots are still available, prioritize blocking Ashur. Probably forget about the second coastal in Ahmad's face at this point; Uluru city is still worthwhile though.

- Pledge to protect Cahokia at least as we seem to be winning its faith quest.

- Start farming a GG somewhere, either shoot Jerusalem or DoW a major AI. There's a very exploitable Iron tile in Tikal if we need more workers.

- NC timing doesn't matter, just build it whenever we have the infrastructure for it

- Tech priorities to me are Sailing, Construction, then Horseback -> Civil Service. Sailing pays for itself quickly with Caravan science.

- I wouldn't give GWs or GAs to city-states but I'm not gonna complain if someone else wants to do it

- Trad opener, Patronage or just finishing Liberty are all fine options. Once again I don't think there's a "wrong" social policy path there. Even Honor and Piety can be okay

 

[beetle]

Start farming a GG somewhere, either shoot Jerusalem or DoW a major AI…

Speaking of which, do we give GG to CS? I am thinking no, not unless we have 3+ on the field.

NC timing doesn't matter, just build it whenever we have the infrastructure for it.

Works for me. Liberty finisher GE for NC is not a terrible option either.

Tech priorities to me are Sailing, Construction, then Horseback -> Civil Service.

That looks exactly right to me. And I appreciate your flexibility and optimism with the SP!

 

[vadalaz]

Speaking of which, do we give GG to CS? I am thinking no, not unless we have 3+ on the field.

It depends. A CS ally at the right place can be more useful in a fight than GG's combat bonus or a citadel.

Regarding rules:

1) If we allow lump sums, I think we'll have to remove the limit on AI gold altogether, otherwise we'd have to do lump sum to gpt conversions and keep track of too many things, which gets boring really quickly

2) Personally I don't have any strong feelings about the trade routes rule, but halting growth isn't that bad. You can work specialists or tiles with good yields that aren't food and try to have the target city grow at the same pace as the origin city

3) The point of the limit on CS workers is to prevent getting too much value out of a long war with a CS, but still provide the opportunity to get some workers if stealing from AIs goes badly. I think it does the job fairly well but I'm open to suggestions

 

[Grendeldef]

@Grendeldef by “small table in every transition post” are you visualizing a kind of running log or just a status snap shot? And is a transition post when anyone hand off their ten-turn rounds, once everyone had a ten-turn round, once per era, or maybe when someone calls a time out for planning and discussion?

I thought it as a uniform data set relevant to our rules. With a glimpse one could easily see if there're CS Workers to catch, NWs to be found, bribes to make, GSs to bulb and where GMus can still go on a concert tour. Now the data is scattered around one or multiple previous posts which is harder to keep in mind & will in all likelihood result bribes & bulbes against the rules.

I missed this last game, and probably did lump-sum trades. I should have asked since it did strike me as odd that we had not accounted for lump sum trading with self-imposed gpt cap. Since there are other conditions, lump sum trading never felt to me like it was a defective game mechanism.

I was confused when @vadalaz said not to take more workers from Jerusalem. I though he meant we already had more workers than we could use! CS worker stealing opportunities are limited enough that I am not convinced this limit would be reached more than once per game.

I just copied the rules from previous game apart from this bit

I very much agree with not running TR from low pop cities to the cap. Halting growth when TR are turn limited anyways seems a bit silly to me.

I don't where & when the lump sum part came but it didn't seem that big of an issue either way.

Limiting the # of Workers that can be stolen from CS & make it dependant on our expansion was a balancing measure between outright banning the stealing and having no limits on taking them from a CS as DoWing a CS for a Worker was deemed as too cheezy. It's also sort of a safety measure against bad luck if stealing from major AI is next to impossible we can take few from CS instead. I think the rule works fine atm but I'm fine with more liberal rules but I do oppose the outright ban.

I implemented the halting part for this game. The purpose of the rule was/is to prevent a food TR from lower pop city to higher pop city and this just removes the grey area. I asked about this back then and got one voice for allowing growth which seems to defeat the purpose of the rule and one voice for halting so I made a plurality based clarification to the rule. I dislike rules which leave room for opposite interpretations. I've for long suspected German hidden heritage but it's a bit late to do anything about that now.

Gren's report table. How did you envision filling out the bribe, GS and GMu part?

Bribe & GS are binary done/not done easily indicated with minus signs & writing done for example and GMu part a list of AIs where Elvis has already left the building. It doesn't have to be anything fancy.

 

[raider980]

Onward.

T50. Worker retreats out of danger at Stockholm. PoP Prague & Cahokia. Sigtuna buys Gold and switch to archer.

T51. Scarcher healing.

Interim. Terra Cotta Army built in a far away land. Prague and Lhasa no longer need our help with the barb camp.

T52. Discover Calendar, start Sailing. Meet Ragusa N of Sugar city to be, PoP - they have a barb camp quest near us. Found the city of Helsinki, starts Monument.

Interim. Maus of Hali built in a far away land, didn't get close with that one.

T53. Start settler in Stockholm. Thought about a caravan but its dangerous out there still. Western Scout kills barb archer.

Interim. Pacal complains about us settling near him. Too bad, we settle where we please.

T54. Hand axe pillages a stone quarry. Western Scout promoted, sight. Working on bringing Sugar and Copper online.

Interim. Cape Town wants a NW.

T55. Oh, look at that; we discover Mt. Sinai NW of Helsinki (not in range though).

Interim. NW discovered for Vatican and Cape Town, friends with both. Morroco takes Dance of the Aurora. Pacal enters Mideval through Theology I think (it costs less than the others).

T56. Scarcher healing in hopes to snipe the barb camp quest near Kyzyl.

T57. Trade Copper for 7gpt to Ahmad. Ashur would only give 6gpt.

Interim. Petra built in a far away land.

T58.

• Discover Sailing, start The Wheel.
• Sigtuna finishes Archer, back to Granary. Stockholm finishes Settler, starts Stone Works.
• Archers heading to clear the annoying barb camp between Stock and Sig.

Interim. Colossus built in a far away land. Pacal builds Parthenon.

T59. Settler heading to southern spot to block Ashur and Ghandi. Switch Helsinki to Caravan.

Interim. Oh great, more barbs coming to Stockholm.

• Settler is heading toward the alternative red that I think everyone was talking about previously - red circle in my post on previous page. Hopefully that's the right spot.
• Several of our troops are missing altitude training.
• Barbs are getting annoying, probably need more troops. Maybe should have built another one in Sigtuna instead of continuing Granary but everything seemed to take so long.

Spoiler T60 Map :

--------------------------
cities 3
workers 4
NW ? where do you see this?
--------------------------
Ancient
------------------------
gpt from AI: 7
bribe ---
GS ---
GMu ---
--------------------------

 

[beetle]

I did some statistics tables. I don't like that I am repeating Turn/Era, but the formatting options seem limited (as compared to HTML or vBulletin or MediaWiki or Markdown). Also, tables in Xenforo seem to always be full width. I may experiment more.

What the next player really needs to know:

Turn | Era | gpt limit | current gpt | may DOW bribe | may GS bulb | Cities | Workers | may CS worker steal

60​

|

Ancient​

|

20​

|

7​

|

yes​

|

yes​

|

3​

|

4​

|

no​

Status:

Turn | Era | Score | Rank

60​

|

Ancient​

|

98​

|

10/10​

Exploration:

Turn | Era | Scouts | Caravels | AIs | CS | NWs

60​

|

Ancient​

|

2​

|

0​

|

4/9​

|

9/30​

|

2/7(?)​

Military:

Turn | Era | Ranged | Melee | Horse

60​

|

Ancient​

|

3​

|

2​

|

0​

 

[Grendeldef]

NW ? where do you see this?

Hover over the pop up NW pic when you find one & it'll tell how many there're left to be found


I'm playing totally different game once more but this is the last time I'll mention it as I'm off after this stint. Sorry, but I can't do this anymore as it doesn't make any sense from anyone's pov.


T60

- bribed Ashur to DoW Gandhi for Copper, 2gpt & 2 Horses
- withdraw PoP from Cape Town
- Sigtuna & Helsinki switch to Archers
- killed barb Warrior

T61

- Settled Birka
- killed barb Spearman

T63

- Pacal founds & DoWs - cool. Mosques gone
- bought a Spearman in Sigtuna
- Wheel, starting Construction
- Kyzyl camp cleared

T64

- met Tyre, Gems, most likely the home of that camp Worker
- oddly enough Pacal's Sigtuna-fronline has 5 melee units

T65

- Pacal enhances, Pagodas gone
- Ahmad builds HG & GW is built somewhere

T66

- Iron to Gandhi 2/3gpt
- Gandhi Medieval
- Representation
- met Buenos Aires, Silver

T67

- 2nd religion, Tengriism, Tithe & Religious Community
- Ragusa's camp cleared

T68

- Sugar pillaged
- met Buenos Aires, Silver

T69

- Horses to Ashur 2/3 gpt
- lost count of killed Mayan units but not even nearly enough


--------------------------
cities 4
workers 5
NW 4, more or less educated quess
--------------------------
Ancient
------------------------
gpt from AI: 11
bribe done, Ashur vs Gandhi
GS ---
GMu ---
--------------------------

Spoiler pix :

-----

- NINJA is down south trying to do another camp q
- Sigtuna seems fine for this & next turn but after that it's anyone's guess. Haven't seen Horsemen or Catas yet and most of the focus is targeted at Sigtuna
- Atlatlists are hitting 17-22 to the Pike
- Birka has defenses atm and the Assyrian-Indian war doesn't seem particularly active though Dur-Sharrukin's health has dropped occasionally
- Uluru neighbourhood got swarmed by barbs so I ran away
- Sigtuna has had a turn short Archer for a while now but Pacal has covered every free tile so I haven't been able to finish it
- barb camp near Sigtuna has an Archer
- Ashur has an unhealthy # of STs near Nimrud


Good luck to everyone.

 

[raider980]

Woah, Pacal is bringing it. What's come over him? Usually he is the first AI to get killed because he is always building wonders and not units. I guess he really didn't like us settling Helsinki. That's good though, this is reminiscent of the Rome game when Dido attacked and never stopped. And that one was the most fun yet.

I can't say I understand the location of Birka though. Is it a compromise for the defensibility? Or the Stone?

Sorry to see you go @Grendeldef if you're not having fun no need to play. Just to be sure, are you stopping now or at the end of this game? You'll miss the Great Mayan War.

I did some statistics tables. I don't like that I am repeating Turn/Era

@beetle This is great, very helpful! I don't mind the repeated Turn/Era but I don't think you really need to repeat it since it is the same for each set of statistics. It could just be left in the first one.

 

[beetle]

I am also sorry to see you go @Grendeldef — but hopefully there’s no hard feelings and I agree it does not make sense to play if you are not having fun. FWIW, your participation increased my enjoyments, even though our playing styles were sometimes at odds. The differences were a surprise to me, and I appreciated that too.

 

[vadalaz]

Thanks for playing & the map @Grendeldef, sorry this didn't work out for you.

T70:
- Resume Caravan in Stockholm, start Settler in Sigtuna
- Revoke protection of our CS friends

T71:
- Construction done, start Trapping
- Sigtuna in the red
- Camp cleared for Buenos, keep the worker

Interim: Gandhi proposed friendship, decline as I don't want to annoy Ashur more than necessary

T72:
- Pacal retreating it seems. Resuming Caravan in Helsinki

T73:
- Yep, Pacal has had enough. Still wants a city for peace though
- Caravan to Nimrud, start Settler in Stockholm

T74:
- First GG is born, Pikeman has double Cover
- Pacal suicides one last Atlatlist in
- Trapping done, start Horseback

T75:
- Settler done, one-turning a Spear for escort next
- Birka pop 3, starts settler
- 4 Iron <> 6 gpt w/Gandhi

T76:
- Golden Age ends
- 2 Iron <> 3 gpt w/Ashur

T77:
- Pacal finishes Great Mosque

T78:
- Pacal wants gold and resources for peace now
- Gift GG to Cahokia

T79:
- Horseback done, start Mathematics

Spoiler Screenshot :

@beetle is up.

Notes and some food for thought

- We'll get 8 happiness from Cahokia when they receive our GG, and Sigtuna will get Dyes soon so happiness-wise we should be ok for now
- Partially finished CB and Spear in Sigtuna, partially finished CB in Helsinki, partially finished Granary in Birka. Tons of overflow in Stockholm
- Might want to reassign tiles in Sigtuna, it's still working its Settler production tiles. Same with Birka when it finishes its Settler, that city's starving
- Settler in Sigtuna was meant for the Gold spot, others for the eastern spots
- I don't think we'll get the reckless expander penalty when we settle our 5th city but we might get it with the 6th, so there could be little time left to secure DoFs
- I sent Ashur a caravan in hopes of becoming friends with him, but unfortunately he still dislikes us
- I suggest sending the next one to Ahmad, he seems much friendlier
- To do that we need to get within caravan range of Casablanca
- So one option is to plant the Spices spot, purchase the Spices tile, send a caravan from there to Casablanca, then wait a turn for it to register to see if Ahmad offers a DoF, and then plant the 6th city and potentially trigger reckless expander
- An alternative is to send that settler to Uluru, build Caravansary in the capital and send the caravan to Casa from there (it's exactly 15 tiles). The timing works - 3 turns to finish the Caravan in Helsinki, 4 turns for Caravansary in Stockholm. The problem with this is that Ashur's borders might grow to the Spices and Stockholm's hammers might be better spent on something else, e.g. army. I do like the idea of finally going for Uluru though
- I've pillaged the Iron and the farm adjacent to it in Tikal. Might be able to catch a worker there
- I started moving some units to Assyrian borders, we'll need more though. I suppose we do have our Classical bribe if we suspect an incoming DoW
- Could finish Liberty in 2 turns if we wanted. Great Admiral would be an interesting option - potentially gets us some lux trades with faraway civs, maybe DoFs as well, finds more CSs, doesn't affect GSEM-GWAM counters, and then can be gifted away at some point for 90 influence

Edit: I guess yet another alternative path is to try and co-DoW Ahmad with Ashur and take Casablanca since that's the exact spot where we wanted a city anyway

Info:
------------------
Cities 4
Workers 6
Cannot steal from CS (need cities >= workers)
------------------
Classical era

GPT from AI: 20 (cap 40)
May bribe
May bulb GS
------------------

 

[beetle]

For this map, since it is Continents and we might never get Caravels, I loved the idea of a Great Admiral, so that is what I did.

When did we found?

• T080
  • Morocco found Islam
  • Construction unlocks, start on Mathematics
  • Settler out in Stockholm build a Granary (one turn)
  • upgrade Archers as gold allows
  • looks like Gandhi is aiming to settle in our land
• T081
  • Gandhi settles Pataliputra between Sigtuna and Birka
  • Stockholm starts on Caravansary
• T082 close out Liberty with Meritocracy for Great Admiral, but I almost wasted it on a GPr
• T083 moving in on Tikal
• T084 Mathematics unlocked, start on Optics
• T085 take Indian Settler from barb camp
• T086
  • Chichen Itza has been built in a far away land!
  • settle Uppsala six hexes NW of Stockholm on inland hill for gold
  • send TR to Almaty
• T087
  • taking shots at Tikal
  • settle Turku on coastal hill on Uluru
• T088
  • Pacal builds Hagia Sophia
  • Caravansary done, start on Barracks
  • trade Ahmad 8 gpt for Copper, horses and mutual OB
• T089
  • Optics researched, start on Currency
  • clear empty Barb Camp near Cape Town

@fiddlesticks is up. Next city I was moving towards is coastal river hill SE of Turku. Also settler for a city between Birka and Turku. Or are we trying to put two cities in that space? Tikal I think will go down pretty quick. Do we keep? I guess I would vote no.

Turn | Era | gpt limit | current gpt | may DOW bribe | may GS bulb | Cities | Workers | may CS worker steal

90​

|

Classic​

|

40​

|

21​

|

yes​

|

yes​

|

6​

|

7​

|

no​

 

[raider980]

Or are we trying to put two cities in that space?

I would put 4 more cities. I’ll draw up a map tomorrow. But 2 desert, 1 mountain pass, 1 mountain stone.

Couldn't sleep so here it is.

Spoiler Moar Cities! :

 

[vadalaz]

If we give up the Spices and just trade for it with (or take it from) Ashur, we could go for something like this

Spoiler :

Yellow is hard to push into, gets Stoneworks and Circus for some helpful local happiness, White has more food than any other city so it could run Guilds, Green is a bold move without a DoF w/Morocco - if Ahmad attacks, the city is surrounded and falls in 1 turn - but the settler is already there so might as well plant it.

This leaves a bit of space SW of Turku and Ahmad might want to settle the cows-elephant spot but it should be fairly easy to block. Barbs might also spawn there, not necessarily a bad thing as Cahokia could target the camp.

 

[beetle]

I like @vadalaz green / yellow / white spots. I meant to mention that I did not ask Ahmad for DOF, as I understood the plan to be to do that right before planting the green spot.

I think we should stop after those three spots are claimed. If we raze Tikal, there might be good space for one more city west. Stockholm can pump out Settlers in two turns.

I see it now, Tengrism founded t67. I am concerned that I might be overlooking other significant information!

 

[fiddlesticks]

I'll post the write up in a bit. Palenque will fall next turn, but I lost a few good units.

 

[vadalaz]

In my experience asking for DoF never works unless renewing one that has just ended, so I was hoping Ahmad would offer a DoF himself. Having said that, Ahmad appears to be building Machu Picchu in Casablanca. If he gets it, I think we should just attack him together with Ashur, perhaps gifting the next GG to Cape Town and becoming allies prior to the attack.

 

[beetle]

In my experience asking for DoF never works unless renewing one that has just ended…

Interesting, as it seems to me that I initiate the DOF about half the time! I will have to try and watch for that. Maybe those are declined much more often than I am remembering!

If he gets it, I think we should just attack him together with Ashur, perhaps gifting the next GG to Cape Town and becoming allies prior to the attack.

I like this idea.

Circling back to the discussion about our ruleset…

If we allow lump sums, I think we'll have to remove the limit on AI gold altogether, otherwise we'd have to do lump sum to gpt conversions and keep track of too many things, which gets boring really quickly

This makes sense. The purpose of the rule was not to exploit rich deity AIs for too much money. I really should have asked sooner about our limitations on lump sum trades.

The point of the limit on CS workers is to prevent getting too much value out of a long war with a CS, but still provide the opportunity to get some workers if stealing from AIs goes badly. I think it does the job fairly well but I'm open to suggestions

I agree. Thank you for articulating this. @Grendeldef provided a similar explanation.

I implemented the halting part for this game. The purpose of the rule was/is to prevent a food TR from lower pop city to higher pop city and this just removes the grey area.

The purpose of our internal TR rule, as with our other rules, is not to exploit obviously broken game mechanics. Running TR from low pop expos to the high pop cap is blatant cheese, and I am delighted that we are not doing that. TR between two coastal expo cities of the approximate same size doesn’t feel like a cheat to me. Halting growth at an expo when it reaches the pop of the city sending it a TR seems like dogmatic following of our hastily written rules — instead of considering why we decided to give ourselves some self-imposed limitations.

I would prefer that we keep our rules as simple as possible. If a player seems to be using a loophole, as I have done twice now, I think it makes sense to take the time to discuss why some of our rules have caveats or additional details, and why those are important to the purpose of some of our self-imposed rules. Or maybe the discussion might turn to concluding that a simpler rule is good enough?

I dislike rules which leave room for opposite interpretations.

I agree with this in general especially since, in my experience, arguing over rules seems like an entrenched part of gamer culture. As an aside, have you played any of Sandy Petersen’s board games? The terse-but-exact phrasing of the at-the-table components were obviously written by rule lawyers!

 

[fiddlesticks]

Here's the re-cap of turns 90-99:
90: Tikal falling fast. Casablanca building Machu Pichu
91: Stockholm finishes Barracks, starts Chariot Archer. Copper, 1gpt, 1 horse to Assurbanipal for Spices. Assurbanipal covets our land. Bought a cattle tile in Stockholm and started a pasture. Captured Tikal - chose to raise it.
92: Bringing up Scarcher to Tikal to upgrade. Sigtuna finishes Spearman starts Stable. Sold Library in Tikal.
93: Pacal retreating to Palenque. Buenos Aries is Bankrupt (from Assurbanipal). Mosque auto-built with faith in Helsinki (I have never turned on auto-buy with faith, so this was new to me, but seemed a good move). Stockholm finishes Chariot Archer, starts Stable. Found Lund on the desert Copper. Somewhere around here I found Linkoping near Ahmad and he immediately tells me he's not happy about it. Not sure that city placement will work out so well.
94: Assurbanipal has Longswords and Trebuchets near Birka. There's a barb camp with a settler near Birka. Sending 2 Spearmen and a damaged archer over there.
95: Trade iron from Tikal to Gandhi for an embassy and 1gpt.
96: Pacal wants peace and will give us Chitzen Itza. No to that and keep attacking. Almaty gives us a Horseman who heads for Palenque. Ragusa wants a road (we're no longer friends).
97: Renew 2 iron for 3gpt with India. Stockholm finishes Stable starts CB. Works cattle over copper to grow to size 8 in 8 turns. Currency done, start Drama and Poetry to set up Civil Service. Meet Quebec City on the new continent and head south.
98: Find Cerro de Potosi for Cape Town. Attacking Palenque.
99: Either Turn 98 or 99 Pacal finishes Borodubur in Palenque! I've lost a CB, Spearman, Chariot Archer and maybe one other unit. Clear the barb camp and keep Ahmad's Settler.