ALC Game #25: Celts/Boudica, Take 2

[z0wb13]

I think it is a bit early for dot-mapping the north. Especially with a war with MM looming on the horizon. All those cities not only cost gold but drive up the cost of any newly captured cities. As well as the unit costs because you need atleast one unit to garrison each. Granted more cities means more free units. But adding 7-8 crappy cities? Including one that claims Iron (which we do not need and a single silk but no food to work them. Drop a city to claim the gems and another to claim the pigs and whip up an army. Save the northern lands for later.

i agree/disagree.

firstly, i agree that most of the north is going to produce crappy cities and that 7-8 is too many to build in the next 200-400 turns.

i disagree that war is looming on the horizon with mansa. i can't find the last update... so i could be far off. but, why not buddy up with mansa and go to war with those civs to his SE? mansa would buffer you from those ai and can help you to tech better than any other ai.

so, using Hans Lemurson's last dot map, settle the red spot first to block. then yellow, as you can work all its bonus tiles immediately. then the green because you can work its food immediately and get silk soon.

those first five cities would probably be profitable at this stage in the game. they all have some very good land. so i don't see any point in putting them off just to gear up and attack mansa. i would try to build a bunch of guerilla 3 gallic warriors to go and raze whatever is SE of him, but i think it could be useful to keep good relations w/ mansa in the short term.

in the long term

also, the purple whale city when you get optics and the cyan one when you need iron and have civil service.

 

[Munch]

The only difference between HansLemurson's and Summoner's dotmaps is the wine city. Everything else looks solid, and deciding on the wine city can wait anyway. Besides, wherever the wine city goes it will SUCK, it can't even feed itself properly. I think it should be considered whether it is worth it to even build the thing! We'll get the wine by culture anyway sooner or later.

As for next city (after the blocker, red in both dotmaps), it has to be fish-gems. No doubt! Fish AND gems in 10 or so turns is far superior to rice and something else in however many turns.

After this, it is debatable whether to get the rice city down or to attempt further expansion towards Mansa. War or not, expanding towards him wouldn't hurt as long as your military is in shape, which it really should be by then. So as an alternative to rice-silk going down after fish-gems, why not consider fish-clam-wheat, 4 tiles north of Timbuktu?

 

[Hans Lemurson]

I basicly agree with you, and in no way did I mean to imply that all those cities should be settled immediately(last bit not directed at you). The dotmap is just to determine what goes where, since the position of one city affects all the other cities.

The Red Pig/Dye city is a land-grab, plain and simple. It also seals off the borders to your peninsula at the chokepoint, so you only need to focus your defense in one location. (Hehe, "defense". That's funny.)

If he's planning a war right away, then the yellow fish/gems/spice city makes the most sense, since both of those resources are easily exploitable and the gems will easily pay for themselves in both commerce and happiness. Spice is good too. If war is not immediately on the horizon, then the red land-grab city is the best, to make sure the AI doesn't make a grab for the resources with awkwardly placed cities. The red city also marks about the limit of military control, and anything further than that is in danger of being cut-off, or conquered.

 

[Munch]

I basicly agree with you, and in no way did I mean to imply that all those cities should be settled immediately(last bit not directed at you). The dotmap is just to determine what goes where, since the position of one city affects all the other cities.

Don't worry, I understand. I do that in my games all the time. That is, all the games I don't quit prematurely for almost no reason.

The Red Pig/Dye city is a land-grab, plain and simple. It also seals off the borders to your peninsula at the chokepoint, so you only need to focus your defense in one location. (Hehe, "defense". That's funny.)

Indeed, which is why I think it has to go down straight away.

If he's planning a war right away, then the yellow fish/gems/spice city makes the most sense, since both of those resources are easily exploitable and the gems will easily pay for themselves in both commerce and happiness. Spice is good too. If war is not immediately on the horizon, then the red land-grab city is the best, to make sure the AI doesn't make a grab for the resources with awkwardly placed cities. The red city also marks about the limit of military control, and anything further than that is in danger of being cut-off, or conquered.

You might be right about that, I don't know. I'm leaning towards pig city straight away no matter what but your argument about fish-gems might actually be more efficient.

 

[Sisiutil]

Sorry for the continued delay. The malware spread from the wife's machine to mine through our home network (of course). Made both computers well-night unusable for a time. But with help from our ISP tech support we got both machines cleaned up. I'll try to play and update soon.

 

[azzaman333]

Eww, that sucks.

Eagerly awaiting an update!

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

May I take a wild guess and say it was the Spyware Protect 2009 trojan? I got hit with that a while ago which is why I'm typing this message from a lap top I'm borrowing.

 

[oynaz]

Sorry for the continued delay. The malware spread from the wife's machine to mine through our home network (of course). Made both computers well-night unusable for a time. But with help from our ISP tech support we got both machines cleaned up. I'll try to play and update soon.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Always keep updated anti-virus software (Avast, AVG and Antivir or all free for private use, and does a good job) and updated anti-spyware software (Windows Defender is provided by Microsoft and works surprisingly well. Ad-Aware is good too).

Watch out for fake anti-spyware or anti-virus software, though!

 

[yena]

You could use avoid virus attacks by using Linux; BtS runs fine on Wine

 

[oynaz]

I know, I have been tempted to move to Linux for a long time. However, I use my computer to do a lot of work with music, and there simply is no sufficiently advanced music software for Linux.

Well, that was off-topic

 

[Matthew5117]

You could use avoid virus attacks by using Linux; BtS runs fine on Wine

Or you could use a Mac and play BtS via Bootcamp. Just don't hook up to the internet on the Windows side and you won't get any viruses.

Anyways... I hope your computers will get better soon! (for the sake of us!... just kidding)

 

[CivCorpse]

I am guessing the Vundo or Vondo or Vondu...whatever it is called. It's a bugger.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

I am guessing the Vundo or Vondo or Vondu...whatever it is called. It's a bugger.

Yeah, I got that recently. After trying way too many official fixes (Norton, Macaffee, etc.), I decided to just run spybot and a couple other freebies they found most of it.

 

[Summoner]

Ugh. Vundo's the only malware ever to defeat my best efforts, and in cleaning up after two cases of win32trojanDownloader I've seen a truely apalling degree of contamination.

 

[CivCorpse]

For vondo go to malwarebytes.com....they have a free version that scoops it right out. Run it in "Safe Mode" Only takes about 15 minutes. You may need to reboot and run it a second time.

 

[Summoner]

For vondo go to malwarebytes.com....they have a free version that scoops it right out. Run it in "Safe Mode" Only takes about 15 minutes. You may need to reboot and run it a second time.

One of the two vondo infections I encountered was a variant newer than any of the cleaners. Ended up having to do a HD nuke there since it also post dated the livecd manual processes that were documented.

 

[CivCorpse]

wow, you must have gotten it like last week

 

[Summoner]

Actually it was about a year ago (last May???). The same idiot was responsible for both infections, one was an older varient and realtively easily cleaned; the other new enough that the cleaners failed.

PS we're getting rather OT, is there another location we could continue this?

 

[vanatteveldt]

Well Sis ain't posting anything anyway

 

[Sisiutil]

I played the round tonight, I'll post it tomorrow.