Rex Tyrannus
280lbs of gross stupidity
Well folks, we've had a couple of wrenches thrown in gears of "the plan". I'll explain in a moment, but first, without knowledge of the wrenches, I started my set like a good little boy.
I turned down the espionage slider to 30% and turned off all espionage allocation to everyone but Joao.
The result was an the identical EPs going to Portugal, but a surpluss of around 1000 GP per turn to fund later defecit research. I turned espionage back up to 60% after my eigth turn with 8500 or so, a figure I calculated will fund eleven turn of 100% research.
Next, still oblivious to the upcoming wrinkles, I took stock of our empire. Here's a screenshot of the F1 screen, sorted by hammers.
Something I did during my set was to put factories and power in most of our top producers, so the F1 screen probably looks pretty different now. (Yeah, probably should have taken that screen shot instead.)
I also took a look at the tech situation.
We're not just at tech parity. We have every last tech other than the garbage techs I don't want anyway. Awesome.
* * *
So that was the extent of my setup. I didn't micro-manage any of our cities because I figured I'm about 13% dumber than Arathorn and I'd only fumble something up if I tried. So I hit enter, knowing full well that I was going to get a Great Merchant next turn.
* * *
Or not.
Five percent chance.
Our next great person comes in 37 turns. Or, as I like to think of it, 17 turns after we need someone other than another &%$#ing Great Prophet!!!!!
* * *
Sigh. Well, nothing I can do about that but persevere. And, by persevere, I mean steal tech. Joao gave us Fiber Optics early on.
And Hannibal started learning Robotics. We still had a surpluss, so I took it. More for the principle than anything, really.
Now this is really weird. I had nothing else to steal. We had spies sitting around doing nothing, just cocked at 50% discount, loaded with thousands of EPs, and nothing to steal.
Creepy.
I looked again at the spy situation. We still needed Ecology, Superconductors, Genetics, and Fission. Four techs and we had about eight spies sitting in that one city. So I decided to send two of them over to mainland Portugal to be Johnny on the scene as needed.
Well, actually, one of them got caught while idle, but the other is in Lisbon Joao's Iron Works city. More on that later.
Still five spies in our prime steal tech city was just fine by me.
But then Joao did something weird or, at least, not in the script. When he finished Fiber Optics, he went straight for Fusion, passing up all those other techs. Now, I'm still not certain if this is good or bad. We were planning on outproducing him on the Engine, but he's already building two before I can start one. (I had set our Iron Works city to a Docking Bay and it wouldn't finish until two turns after Portugal learned Fusion.
What throws this all off, though, is that Cathy, while I was waiting for Joao to finish Fusion (in six turns), learned Superconductors.
Making maters stupider, Joao set his research to Lasers after Fusion came in, rendering himself almost completely useless to us, but sill a huge threat. He has some monster producers and I'm pretty sure he spent his Great Engineer (thanks to Fusion) on the Space Elevator.
We have a huge surpluss of EPs with Portugal, so I took the opportunity to sabatoge his completed Docking Bay (thanks T-Hawk for that nugget of goodness). I have a spy in Lisbon who can sabotage production of the Elevator, but it's expensive. The elevator's two turns away and we're at about a 30% discount right now. (Sorry, forgot to verify stats.)
So now we have two countries worth of espionage to manage. This was about the time when I decided we had enough cash and so, while turning the slider back up to 60%, I reallocated to give us about 1000 EP/turn with Cathy. I then put a spy on a Galleon and put her on a go-to to Cathy's closest city.
Cathy is now researching Genetics. With any luck, she'll finish it around the time Doofus learns lasers and we can have a two tech lead on him and a good head start on the thrusters.
I recommend sabatoging his space elevator before he builds it (you can only wreck a project after it's built) and taking out both engines after the fact.
We also need to get more spies to Cathy, as I only have the one. Three spies died during my set and I only built one to replace.
* * *
That's it for the interesting. I made one trade with Joao to bring in more happy.
I didn't want to give him silver, but our Iron Works city had a redshirt. Joao's got more happy to give us if we want to feed him more himself.
Otherwise, I built up our military, though we're still about 25% of the other guys on the power graph. I'd rather not been seen as a target of opportunity. (I wonder if we can pay someone to war against Joao?)
Anyhow, heightening my anxiety about us being low hanging fruit, we took three or four demands during my set and I turned down every one of them. I can't stop trading with someone when we're on the brink of unhappiness and they're giving us Silk.
Is that it? I hope so. My hands hurt from typing so much.
* * *
Edit: I only found out when I went to manage attachments that I failed to save at the end of my set. Fortunately, autosave had one at the beginnig of my tenth turn, so I just replayed my last turn and was able to verify some things.
1) The spy on the scene was in Lisbon, where Joao's building an Engine, not the elevator. The elevator is in another city, four turns away. I moved our spy up to that city. We won't be able to use a full discount, but we have 24k EPs in Joao.
2) Also our EP is set to four for Cathy, three for Joao, and one apeiece for Vicky and Mansa. Hannibal has a bunch already saved up, so he's at zero.
I turned down the espionage slider to 30% and turned off all espionage allocation to everyone but Joao.
The result was an the identical EPs going to Portugal, but a surpluss of around 1000 GP per turn to fund later defecit research. I turned espionage back up to 60% after my eigth turn with 8500 or so, a figure I calculated will fund eleven turn of 100% research.
Next, still oblivious to the upcoming wrinkles, I took stock of our empire. Here's a screenshot of the F1 screen, sorted by hammers.
Something I did during my set was to put factories and power in most of our top producers, so the F1 screen probably looks pretty different now. (Yeah, probably should have taken that screen shot instead.)
I also took a look at the tech situation.
We're not just at tech parity. We have every last tech other than the garbage techs I don't want anyway. Awesome.
* * *
So that was the extent of my setup. I didn't micro-manage any of our cities because I figured I'm about 13% dumber than Arathorn and I'd only fumble something up if I tried. So I hit enter, knowing full well that I was going to get a Great Merchant next turn.
* * *
Or not.
Five percent chance.
Our next great person comes in 37 turns. Or, as I like to think of it, 17 turns after we need someone other than another &%$#ing Great Prophet!!!!!
* * *
Sigh. Well, nothing I can do about that but persevere. And, by persevere, I mean steal tech. Joao gave us Fiber Optics early on.
And Hannibal started learning Robotics. We still had a surpluss, so I took it. More for the principle than anything, really.
Now this is really weird. I had nothing else to steal. We had spies sitting around doing nothing, just cocked at 50% discount, loaded with thousands of EPs, and nothing to steal.
Creepy.
I looked again at the spy situation. We still needed Ecology, Superconductors, Genetics, and Fission. Four techs and we had about eight spies sitting in that one city. So I decided to send two of them over to mainland Portugal to be Johnny on the scene as needed.
Well, actually, one of them got caught while idle, but the other is in Lisbon Joao's Iron Works city. More on that later.
Still five spies in our prime steal tech city was just fine by me.
But then Joao did something weird or, at least, not in the script. When he finished Fiber Optics, he went straight for Fusion, passing up all those other techs. Now, I'm still not certain if this is good or bad. We were planning on outproducing him on the Engine, but he's already building two before I can start one. (I had set our Iron Works city to a Docking Bay and it wouldn't finish until two turns after Portugal learned Fusion.
What throws this all off, though, is that Cathy, while I was waiting for Joao to finish Fusion (in six turns), learned Superconductors.
Making maters stupider, Joao set his research to Lasers after Fusion came in, rendering himself almost completely useless to us, but sill a huge threat. He has some monster producers and I'm pretty sure he spent his Great Engineer (thanks to Fusion) on the Space Elevator.
We have a huge surpluss of EPs with Portugal, so I took the opportunity to sabatoge his completed Docking Bay (thanks T-Hawk for that nugget of goodness). I have a spy in Lisbon who can sabotage production of the Elevator, but it's expensive. The elevator's two turns away and we're at about a 30% discount right now. (Sorry, forgot to verify stats.)
So now we have two countries worth of espionage to manage. This was about the time when I decided we had enough cash and so, while turning the slider back up to 60%, I reallocated to give us about 1000 EP/turn with Cathy. I then put a spy on a Galleon and put her on a go-to to Cathy's closest city.
Cathy is now researching Genetics. With any luck, she'll finish it around the time Doofus learns lasers and we can have a two tech lead on him and a good head start on the thrusters.
I recommend sabatoging his space elevator before he builds it (you can only wreck a project after it's built) and taking out both engines after the fact.
We also need to get more spies to Cathy, as I only have the one. Three spies died during my set and I only built one to replace.
* * *
That's it for the interesting. I made one trade with Joao to bring in more happy.
I didn't want to give him silver, but our Iron Works city had a redshirt. Joao's got more happy to give us if we want to feed him more himself.
Otherwise, I built up our military, though we're still about 25% of the other guys on the power graph. I'd rather not been seen as a target of opportunity. (I wonder if we can pay someone to war against Joao?)
Anyhow, heightening my anxiety about us being low hanging fruit, we took three or four demands during my set and I turned down every one of them. I can't stop trading with someone when we're on the brink of unhappiness and they're giving us Silk.
Is that it? I hope so. My hands hurt from typing so much.
* * *
Edit: I only found out when I went to manage attachments that I failed to save at the end of my set. Fortunately, autosave had one at the beginnig of my tenth turn, so I just replayed my last turn and was able to verify some things.
1) The spy on the scene was in Lisbon, where Joao's building an Engine, not the elevator. The elevator is in another city, four turns away. I moved our spy up to that city. We won't be able to use a full discount, but we have 24k EPs in Joao.
2) Also our EP is set to four for Cathy, three for Joao, and one apeiece for Vicky and Mansa. Hannibal has a bunch already saved up, so he's at zero.
Unless you meant to draft from neighboring cities and pile them into Cuzco.
