Pre-turn: Fire taxmen in Eindhoven, Hague, Utrecht, and Arnhem, which increases both growth and taxes by working productive tiles whose commerce is multiplied by commercial buildings. Swap an engineer to a clown in Haarlem to stave off a riot. Swap
three clowns to useful specialists in Breda (and hire another specialist) and another each in Leiden and Tilburg. Hire three engineers in fully corrupt and pop-maxed Gouda. Fire Denhelders engineer and make him work a RR, mined coal mountain, for a gain in both shields and tax money. Lauwersoog swaps from granary (it cant get any bigger) to bank. Were now up to 162gpt net income after micromanaging. Then, I swap Hague, Utrecht, and Eindhoven to rifle production in anticipation of our daring future assault on the UN city. Were going to steal Electronics at some point, so theres no sense spending 2gpt researching it.
Summary of my turns: Renewed our Aztecs horses deal for 36gpt. Caught Monty trying to steal our world map, of all things.
Completed the IA and a FP (it only took Arnhem four turns to do it and our gpt went up by 35). Spanish completed SETI. Our attempt to plant a spy in Spain failed but didnt result in a war declaration. If at first you dont succeed, blah, blah, blah our careful diplo tech steal attempt worked and we acquired Electronics from the lovely Izzy. We then shipped it to the Mongrels along with 6gpt for Refining and 13gp. Packaged with 93gpt to a dying Cathy, it landed us Combustion and 8gp. Hopefully shell either die soon and relieve our payment burden or shell use the income to buy another tech so we can 2-fer steal. We have two sources of oil. One is connected and the other should remain disconnected. Our rifle-producing cities swapped to destroyers.
For the future: Portugal is on its last legs. If we care about our reputation, we shouldnt send them any more hard goods. At this point, Im not sure it matters much. I left a big ol stack of active workers by Rotterdam. Some strategic forest chops could get us some spare artillery units out of our northeastern cities. Maastricht might be able to use a worker merge and Tilburg could stand some mining, but Ill leave that choice to my successor. Have fun!
Sidney Ponson I'm running out of baseball-related "Sid" names here, guys.
Sorry.
Anyway, good to know some different ideas are still being kicked around at Atari.
Masterful trading. When you run out of baseball Sids you can always go to Seinfeld. Don't forget Sid Farcus the bra salesman. In the words of the immortal Estelle Costanza:
