Pirates!

[Morganknight]

I concur with Yellow dot, esp. with the Dye nearby. I don't know if the negatives outweigh the positives or not, but we may want to think about setting up a settlement by the Copper and Deer to the south if we don't find any Copper closer so we can blast through the Colossus at some point...

 

[Madtown]

I think we should explore the western coast of the dye island before settling yellow dot as pictured previously. If there is food up there for a city to claim the dye, then yellow should be settled 1SW to claim the extra plains forest.

Agree it'd be nice to get some copper online in time for colossus. With a map like this, an extra 1 per water tile is huge! MC is no cheap tech though, it was 74 turns of research during my set.

 

[Melior Traiano]

Open the save & all looks to be in order.

Turn 88: Writing is complete. Start researching Metal Casting for Colossus (44 turns). Cut science to 80% to avoid having no cash on hand in case we get a bad random event (like a forest fire). It takes a while to research, but building a Library in Nidaros and running a couple of scientists will make it more reasonable. Colossus is a hugely useful wonder on this map.

Upsala grows to size 3. Switch to training a Settler there.

Turn 89: Judaism FIDL.

Turn 90: Stonehenge BIFAL. 1750 BC.

Turn 92: Meet another victim, I mean neighbor.

And as you can see, Salah ah Din founded Hinduism & has met Tokugawa. Which means someone else founded Buddhism.

Turn 93: Start backtracking our lone Galley to pick up the Settler due in 10 turns at Upsala.

Turn 96: Meet Monsieur Bonaparte and his workboat. He's probably to the east somewhere.

Also get a very welcome event.

And finally, not wanting to take any chances, it was time to inflict some cruel oppression upon our unsuspecting peasantry...

Turn 97: With the GLH in the bag, start Nidaros on a Library to help research.

Turn 99: Our cautious French neighbor comes by demanding Clams. Well, if you insist... To be canceled in 10 turns.

Turn 100: Ivory is finally available to our populace.

Turn 101: Apparently, Gibbon doesn't think we're doing so hot in the tech department.

Also, with 37 in the bank, research is bumped up a notch. Shaves 3 turns off of Metal Casting.

Turn 103: There be pirates here! A barb Galley emerges from the fog SE of Nidaros, just as our own pulls into port at Upsala.

Disembark the Scout and sail our Galley into position to do Sea Patrol for our nets. Also switch Nidaros to Galley, in case Galley #1 gets sunk & we need another to save our nets.

Upsala's Settler is complete, but stranded in the city pending the outcome of the sea battle. Upsala starts another Settler (25 turns because Nidaros has stolen the fish to boost growth).

Turn 104: Barb Galley enters our borders, will attack our boat next turn or try to pillage a net.

Meanwhile, Nappy asks for open borders & I agree.

The Galley in Nidaros can be whipped for two pop if needed, so switch back to finishing the Library. Our citizens all watch with bated breath as the two ships prepare to do battle...

Turn 105: And apparently, our pirating ability needs some work...

Oh well. Probably will want to whip the Galley in Nidaros to save our remaining nets. If the AI decides to heal before pillaging, we may not lose any nets if we get another Galley in the water and can sucker the barb into attacking before it's fully healed. The barb Galley has 80% hit points.

And here's a shot of newly charted territory:

Two gold desert hills near Saladin (one of his cities, probably Medina is NW of Gold Island). No food specials around Dye Island.

I think we'll want to grab the copper-deer site sooner rather than later. If a barb city pops there, that will complicate things a bit. I would also recommend getting some more Galleys out to explore east & west, in case we get lucky and find stone and/or luxuries that are unclaimed. The idle Worker in Nidaros was waiting to board the Galley.

And with that, I file my first SG report. Over to Captain Yena for some revenge on those damn barbs!

 

[yena]

Death to the barbarians! Gonna grab me the save and cut some throats...

 

[yena]

Those pesky barbarians were tough. I whipped the trireme in Nidaros but it lost against the barbarian, and I had to whip another that finally sank the enemy. They managed to pillage two nets

I settled a new city, Haithabu, by the bronze.

On turn 112 Saladin asked for open borders and I agreed.

On turn 120 we got Hinduism in Uppsala, but we are still officially heathens.

Bad news on turn 121 - Napoleon has already proved that the earth is round.


My final turn was 122, when we got Metal Casting. I have set the research to meditation since we need culture badly for border pops, but no beakers have been invested so it can be changed.

We need more cities, military, ships... everything Nidaros has built a library and a new workboat, and we can soon whip another settler in Uppsala. Nidaros is currently building a forge to enable the Colossus. It has still angry people from the whipping, so let it grow once they disappear.

 

[qwertz]

good work, the game is really going nicely

got it, but I don't have much time today. I'll play it tomorrow.

 

[Melior Traiano]

That barb galley set us back aways but thems are the breaks, I guess. Haithabu can start building up some military, maybe two or three boatloads of Axes. The AI border cities should be very lightly defended right now so we might as well take advantage of a good opportunity to poach a city or two.

 

[Madtown]

I'm bored waiting for other SG's to move along, so I thought I'd whip up a couple of mostly worthless dotmaps.

Spoiler :

The north:

Purple dot would be a great island, if it only had a second food resource. Instead it's only decent.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with the dye island. Without any food resouces we'll have to put windmills on the hills, or wait for biology to farm. Even then it has no fresh water.


The south:

Not much to say here. Doing the best that I can with the availble land. Green dot is placed where it is because fish give 1 more food than crabs, not that it matters much.

Most of the sites are pretty much crumbum.

 

[qwertz]

sorry guys, but I somehow can't load yena's save the others work fine, but it causes some trouble . can you maybe check it out?

 

[Madtown]

I made the dotmap from Yena's save, so it worked for me.

 

[yena]

Strange, it's a plain Civ4/BtS installation, and I don't use any mods. Perhaps you can swap with someone who can open the save? Morganknight, can you use my save?

 

[Morganknight]

I will be home in about 3 hours. I will check then if the situation has not been resolved.

 

[qwertz]

I reinstaled the game, but it still keeps crashing when I try to load the save.

 

[Melior Traiano]

I reinstaled the game, but it still keeps crashing when I try to load the save.

Weird. Can you load any of the previous saves, like mine? Any error messages that might be informative?

 

[Morganknight]

I went ahead and played my set as requested. It was a pretty quiet set.

We built the Copper mine in Haitabu and with the barb city next door and an archer wandering around to the south, I build a second unit for defense and move it out of the city as per our rules.

I pause the Forge production in our capitol to replace one of our fishing boats that was destroyed, and queue a couple of axes. I ship our warrior over Uppsala to help them with their happiness issues and quickly grow them to full size while working on a Trading Post for the moment. Once they are full, I switch back and finish a new settler which is loaded up and ready to go. And I go ahead and whip the Trading Post there. The extra food it provides will more than compensate for the lost production.

I finished researching Mysticism and Ironworking and started on Mathematics on our way to Civil Service and 'zerks.

We have Iron nearby.

Tokugawa is encroaching on our borders to the north.

 

[qwertz]

Weird. Can you load any of the previous saves, like mine? Any error messages that might be informative?

yes, all saves work except the yena's. When I try to load it, I get the standard game loading screen for few seconds and than it just crashes down to desktop.
I tryed the new Morganknight's save however and it worked, so mixing up the roster should solve the problem.

 

[qwertz]

First of all I canceled the onesided trade with Napoleon.

Our settler went north and settled the large rice island.

The capital finished the forge and started the colossus.
12 turns later:

Now every city we build gets 3 trade routes with at least 2 each. Also every costal tile produces 4 . So if a new settled city works a costal tile it produces at least 11, which can easily pay for it's maintance => we need more cities

I started another settler and built a tireme which went exploring the west. Our existing ship went to the north.

We researched our way towards CS (CoL finished the last turn). I think we should get CS+machinery ASAP, build some bersakers and go conquer a civ or two. (maybe get agriculture before it for +1 from the corn (our capital is over it's limit) and to farm the rice on the rice island).

 

[qwertz]

And the new roster:

-Madtown (UP)
-Melior Traiano (on deck)
-yena (bathing in the sun)
-Morganknight (climbed up)
-qwertz (cursing his PC)

 

[Madtown]

Got it.

Sweet sets of turns, both of ya. Nabbing the GLH and Colossus is huge on this map!

 

[Melior Traiano]

Good work, guys. Locking up Colossus is another big milestone completed. I wonder though about the Pyramids. I guess we should pray that nobody has Stone hooked up. I'm a bit nervous though that we haven't explored east and west enough yet, as that looks to be the latitudes where a bunch of plains & desert tiles are (Stone doesn't show up on grasslands, I don't think) and we aren't sure that Stone isn't within easy reach by settling (or even conquering).

And I would recommend having a look around Nappy's islands to see if there are any good cities we can nab from him. All of our territory near our home islands are crappy city sites, I think. If Nappy is nearby, we should scope out his land & wrest the good cities from him while the game is still in the early stages.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but this early stage of the game, pre-monarchy with the low happy caps, has some good opportunities for rushing a neighbor & I'd hate to see us not take advantage, especially considering many of the halfway decent islands look to be settled already & the remaining sites are crappy & we own those sites regardless anyway because of proximity. And Napoleon is a crappy tribute demanding backstabber of a neighbor anyway, so we should stick it to him if we can.