BtS archipelago high seas tropics monarch

[Arlborn]

Okie, here is my turnset report. Sorry if you guys expected it earlier(as I said), but life is not always easy!


Turn 1: Look around, nothing to do, press enter.

Turn 2: Haha, nice reminder!

Spoiler :

Vickie asks for education. Sorry, no free candy for her!

Mansa asks for World maps trade, no thank you.

Vickie completes Pyramids!!

Our caravel, with the wonderful name of Trimere Igoodjob destroys a barbarian galley near Phantland, 1.5 str left.

Change Tarsus(useless city ) from Mosketman to lighthouse to speed future whipping/drafting!

Turn 3: Argh! , bad bad computer! Putting a citzencrazyeye specialist on Utica! Terrible!

Turn 4: Some whipping and drafting actions that are clearly the work of a legendary noob such as me!

Turn 5: Isabella asking us to stop trading with Vickie?? Nah, Vickie give us Silver, so no thank you!

Spoiler :

Turn 6: Hum, Isabella consider us her worst enemies now, doh.
Maybe I should have given in, oh well.

Islam spread to Pigiron(sp?) and buddhism spread to Kerkoune(sp?)! Yay!

Spoiler :

Turn 7 - Mansa asks for a bad deal involving techs, which I forgot to take screenshot of! No thank you, you are too kind!

Isabella is not mad with us anymore! I think the +1 from Open border or +1 from Years of peace came in!

Spoiler :

Turn 8 - The all mighty Trimere I(caravel please ) sinks other galley in a great battles in the shores of a barbarian island!

Worker trained in Utica, starts work boat to help out some new cities. Whip it right away for 2 pop! It somehow made sense to my twisted mind at the time!

Settler trained in Carthage, sent to red dot!

Spoiler :

turn 9 - I missclicksad and attack Parthian(barbarian city with marble) from sea(galleon) with a musket!
I win!! Odds were like 60%! He is renamed to Hercules(Portuguese spelling)!

Go ahead and unload the other musket in front of it for the next turn. Might as well make something out of it!


Turn 10 - Barbarian archer attacks our musketman from Parthian and is truly destroyed without a chance!

Spoiler :

Turn 11 - Ouch, Vickie builds Notre Dame and university of Sankore(sp?) in the same turn!

Manceman(who was defending nearby city) attacks Parthian with 66% of odds and... Wins!
Musket takes out last Archer and Parthian is ours!!!

Spoiler :

Sicca is built in red dot.

Spoiler :

Turn 12 - Nada, just awesome micromanaging by the oh-so-legendary noob.

Turn 13 - Isabella built Temple of Salomon.

Turn 14 - Vickie offers feud for Philosophy. No thank you very much.
Mansa adopts mercantilism.

Turn 15(what?? I guess I messed up my turn counting! ) - Steel in. Start forge in Carthage(barracks was built).

Start Feudalism, do nothing else.




Thoughts: Don't forget that there are some Muskets and a mace in Parthian. Let's start training cannos while drafting muskets! I'd attack Mansa Musa. 2 holy cities, tasty! Nothing much else to add.

Roster:

Arlborn
Sengir - UP
Loki Strikes
Dave Hartwick
nocho
silk1976
dualmaster

 

[Sengir]

About Feudalism, I would probably trade it for I-don't-care-what to backwards SB and put out research to communism to get us Kremlin. Looks like vicky has Astro.

Looks like I get to set up the hammers for the war. Lot's of whipping and drafting ahead. If others really want to I'll see about getting a settler out but otherwise it will be mostly military.

@Loki: who do you want to hit, either Mansa or Vicky will do? What kind of army would you like (how many muskets and cannons that is)? Let's see if I can it together.

Will play sometime tomorrow.

 

[Arlborn]

About Feudalism, I would probably trade it for I-don't-care-what to backwards SB and put out research to communism to get us Kremlin. Looks like vicky has Astro.

Looks like I get to set up the hammers for the war. Lot's of whipping and drafting ahead. If others really want to I'll see about getting a settler out but otherwise it will be mostly military.

@Loki: who do you want to hit, either Mansa or Vicky will do? What kind of army would you like (how many muskets and cannons that is)? Let's see if I can it together.

Will play sometime tomorrow.

Nah, no need for settler, really. Just whip cannos and draft muskets that you should be all right. Better not to have more than 10-12 muskets though, that should be enough, for mansa anyway. And it saves pop to whip cannons!

I believe there are right now 6 muskets or so in the empire and a maceman with city raider 2. There is one musket in Parthian that I didn't promote yet. He has 2 promotions left, I'd recommend giving him combat I + medic I so he can be our medic, in the lack of something "better"(worse) that is.

 

[Loki Strikes]

Loki time, we have buddha, go Buddhism Theocracy next player next turn, makes just and izzy happy, lets us get one promotion on our draftees.

Go communism, try not to trade, build up army to crush Vicky

Good set, only thing is should have gone buddha-theo immediately to start cultivating things with our buddha buddies.

I would say we need 10 galleons, 10-12 muskets, 15 cannons should be a start, (that is 7 galleons worth)

And after that keep cannon-musket ratio at about (1.5-2)-1

Kill Vicky as she is biggest threat, we can mop Mansa up later.

 

[nocho]

Kill Vicky as she is biggest threat, we can mop Mansa up later.

Agree on that! Killing Mansa doesn't give us many advantages, killing Vicky assures us winning the game . And she just build us some nice wonders too .

And if we go on the offensive soon, forget about selfresearching feudalism, we can start extorting stuff as well, besides of trading with the backward people of the world, as suggested!

 

[Loki Strikes]

We can easily trade basic economic techs for whatever we need, so self research is a no-no and we won't be on warpath for another 10ish -20ish turns so extortion is a no-no as well. Basic economic techs to nonentities seems the way to go.

 

[Sengir]

Played my set, don't have time for a long report, as my wife needs the laptop.

I played untill 1470AD
I started researching Printing Press which was apparently needed for Scientific Method, we are 7? turns away from SM at the moment.
The buildup isn't finished, but we have got about 10 muskets, cannons had to wait a bit as our iron wasn't hooked up yet

I Razed the barbtown near Goldfish, as it didn't have a sign and we had enough crap towns allready. I tried to take Camun, but I lost a musket at 87% and the barb archer was a barb longbow the turn after.

I traded Phil > Feud + 10g to SB
Phil > Theo +330 to MM (wouldn't want to part with another tech for Phil).
Revolted to Theo and Budh. though theo won't do us much good yet. I whipped the monastery at Kerkouane and it's building a missionary atm. Maybe hold of on finishing SM untill we have another monastery for spreading the faith.
I fired the scientists in Carthage as the GS would take a long time anyway and I prefered to have use it in my whipping frenzy as well (don't worry, I only whipped one coastal tile away). Other cities were slightly heavier whipped

Apologies for the rushed report, I didn't play this rushed though (except for the last turn, so please check the cities).

Two more things: Shaka declared on Sitting Bull and Izzy founded a city near our useless city.

 

[Loki Strikes]

Useless cities! bah never heard of such a thing
Forgiven for having the sense to whip a monastery, and now you can whip Carthage all you want we won't be going back to Bureaucracy any time soon.

Next player should definitely whip a Buddhist monastery or two more before SM, if you have to delay it a bit, go ahead and start on rifling path while we get some buddha monasteries to spread it. (2-3 total should be enough)

GJ on the muskets, cannons is a minor annoyance, but we should still be ready to go soon enough... galleons, cannons, and spreading Buddha to the next person...

 

[Dave Hartwick]

You're up, Loki, I'm on deck.

 

[Loki Strikes]

So I am
Can't play tonight and I have a concert tomorrow night, so I will try and get it in either on Tuesday or late Monday

Well I will follow my plan for further army build up + the spread of Buddha and whatever anyone else manages to remind me to do before I play

 

[Dave Hartwick]

I'll trade turnsets with you, if you don't mind, Loki. I'd rather not play on a Wednesday again as it's my baby minding night. You'll probably get a more interesting turnset out of the deal, too.

 

[nocho]

I see our trade route income took a relative dive, we have of lot more domestic trade again. I am not sure about the mechanics behind this, I suppose it has got something to do with the AIs starting to know eachother more and getting to astronomy (Vicks), leaving less optimal trade routes with and for us.
We're even not nr 1 in GNP anymore , be it though with only 1 of difference. Spamming cities thus might not be that worthwile anymore, since they only get 8 (4*2) of domestic trade to start with. At least our newest outlying cities seem to have that.

What's the exact plan with Vicky? Get her main island and then try to vassalize her, or total annihilation?

Maybe we should pick up literature for calendar with SB, it'd give the possibility to build the heroic epic somewhere. I'd say Hippo as it has the most decent production.

 

[Sengir]

The trade routes is also partly due to Mercantilism on the side of the ai IIRC.

Getting the HE might be nice indeed.

 

[nocho]

The trade routes is also partly due to Mercantilism on the side of the ai IIRC.

Yeah, that makes sense. Let's give those mercantilist bastards a nice beating then, free trade for all! Well, us.

 

[Dave Hartwick]

The HE would be nice, but our production is terrible, plus we're nowhere near having a unit that has the required experience. I'm not looking forward to trying to build the Kremlin without a factory. The best city we've got has something like 20 hammers, most have less than 10.

That's one thing attack Mali would be good for, nocho, production. Timbuktu has some good hills, including an anvil. Plus the Spiral Minaret and the AP-- gold and hammers, seeing how we've locked into a religious strategy. Not to mention Mali's less spread out than England so we could take the whole thing, hopefully, and not have the vassal mess.

Plus there's that population to whip and draft.

I think some tech trading is in order. At least one AI has nationalism, trading it around to Spain, Native America, and Byzantium would net us at least music, drama, guilds, and banking. That or astronomy or printing press, whatever. Victoria is able to research gunpowder, by the way. I doubt we'll be able to build banks anytime soon, but at least guilds will help production and theaters are good for border pops-- cheaper than libraries.

Our GNP would've gone back up if we'd gone the free market route with customs houses. Let's not open that can of worms, though, I'm OK with communist rifles.

 

[nocho]

I would tend to want to take out the strongest opponent first. The longer we wait with taking Vicky out the harder it may be. Now we have an important advantage in muskets and cannons against mainly longbows. If we wait much longer she'll be fielding better defenders. And Vicky would net us Pyramids, Great Library, Hanging Gardens, which is not bad either . Mali should be peanuts any time...

But indeed there are some advantages in taking Mali first as well, as you have pointed out. Mainly because of its compact size and because the cities look like quite solid acquisitions. Last time I checked it was still just 4 cities on one island, so we should be able to do that rapidly. Spinal Minaret and AP are nice, but both wonders need the religious buildings to be truly worthwile, and it doesn't seem we'll have many buddhist monasteries and temples any time soon. Some AP-triggered religious warring maybe nice though. But I suppose Vicky has some buddhist influence as well (didn't check).

I'm not sure what rest of the team thinks so I guess more opinions are welcome...

We may indeed do some trading, though I'm a bit reserved about nationalism and astronomy. I don't think AIs that know those will trade those techs easily away themselves and they are rather key here so I wouldn't easily let everybody know them. So maybe I'd rather trade away PP if we really want to start picking those techs up.
On second thought, if we go state property, I'd just trade for the techs you mentioned if we can pick them up cheaply from the most backward civs, like the current possible Literature-Calendar deal with SB for instance. The hammer from guilds is a plus and maybe the theaters but maybe that's not worth spreading more important techs around the globe.

And about the HE, it's a nice-to-have though not an immediate necessity. I just checked and it costs 200 but only halve with marble which we could connect in the southern city on bacon island. Then it's only 100 and probably feasible. A unit with enough experience we should have soon enough .

 

[Dave Hartwick]

Possibly trading astronomy around would open some trade routes but I'm just guessing.

 

[Sengir]

Astronomy would only close trade routes as AI cities will connect to eachother instead of us. I agree with Nocho on the HE, it won't take that long to build it (especially if we hook up marble).
About the wonders Vicky has: Glib is almost obsolete and I don't know whether HG is for continent or every city. Pyramids are losing their value as well, though we could get some use out of US.

I'd prefer to only trade backwards techs (and definately not astro, we would have to defend our cities if we did that ). I would also go after Vicky first, simply because MM won't be able to come after us, and Vicky might backstab us while we are busy on the other side of the world. Try to vassal her though, we only want her core cities, the rest is pretty crappy IIRC/

 

[nocho]

I was just thinking that if we research communism next (or soon) we might as well use the great spy to infiltrate somebody and backfill missing technology through stealing. Building some spies will be useful anyway to get down city defences just before attacking by inciting revolts.

 

[Dave Hartwick]

Sengir, I'm not sure, but my understanding of trade routes is that the program goes through your cities from best to worst-- however that's judged, size, probably-- and dishes out the foreign routes. You can only have one route to any one foreign city. Domestic trade is different, obviously.

Earlier I thought that your cities competed with the AI cities for routes, so you wanted bigger cities. I had noticed economic declines in several games after a peak with astronomy, but it was most likely a similar situation to this game where AIs went mercantile.

The thread dual quoted wasn't conclusive on competition, but it would be easy to test by gifting astronomy around and seeing if you lost trade routes to bigger AI cities.

Nocho, we need to delay communism because we need to get a couple monasteries going, so scientific method will have to be back burnered for maybe 10-20 turns, depending on if we're willing to take our best production cities off building troops.