RB2 - Clueless Catherine Conquers Crowded Continents

Hrmpf, after I couldn't get through the "Server is busy" replies from CFC yesterday, let's try again today...

During the interturn, Montezuma came and complained about our armies amassing at his borders. These armies were...our scout. :rolleyes: He would complain another time during my turnset.

Turn 66: A newly arrived Ottoman warrior gets bombarded by Edirne and our chariot archer and then splatted by a spearman. A settler near Istanbul can be seen. In addition, our empire becomes unhappy.

Turn 67: During the interturn, a new spear comes out of Istanbul and attacks our spear which had killed the warrior. The attack is across a river and in a forest, so the spear fails to kill our spear. An Ottoman worker hides under the wounded spear and gladly surrenders to our spear when he charges to finish off Suleiman's wounded spear. Yes, this attack was also across the river, but thanks to being on flat lands a decisive victory nonetheless. :hammer: Since our spear is at 2 hitpoints now and in range of Istanbul, I decide to instaheal him.



Archery comes in, and I start us on Mathematics.

Turn 68: Washington has reached the Classical Era. I capture the next worker, start to bombard Istanbul and advance on the city with our spears.

At Edirne, the workers have finished pasturing the cows, and I move them to the silks. I think it would have been better to improve the silks before the cows, as we're short on happiness at the moment and cannot afford to grow much anyway.

Turn 69: During the interturn, Suleiman came again asking for peace. I declined. :D Instead, I bombarded Instanbul with our chariot archer and attack with three spears.



GG Suleiman! :hammer: Thanks to my predecessors for the nice setup for finishing him off. :D I decide to puppet Istanbul. We should discuss what to do with Istandbul and Edrine next (see below).

I sell horses to Washington for gold and make peace with Helsinki. Having to recover our -60 relationship with Helsinki sucks. :sad: While looking over our global relations with the AIs, I notice this:



Do I read this correctly - we are secretly scheming with Caesar against Bismarck while having a pact of cooperation with him? :crazyeye: Is there some higher purpose or is this an Succession Game lack-of-coordination artifact? :lol:

Turn 70: Monte wants us to fight against Washington - I politely decline.

A spear has scouted the area west of Istanbul and found this:



I suggest we found a city on the spear's hex eventually - whales are nice and might otherwise be hard to get, and two fish, cows and two hills make for a nice city.

Ptolemy publishes a list of people with the pointiest sticks.



We're not first, but first on our landmass. :hammer:

Turn 71: The Hanging Gardens get built in a far-away land.

The rest of our turns were fairly uneventful. Every single turn, the game bugged me with a notification that our horse deal with Wu has ended, but the deal never left our list of "current deals". A bug? :confused:

After the silks were connected, our happiness got positive again. Our economy sucks though, we're still losing gold. I focused on our road net, and in two turns all of our cities will be connected to Moscow at once. That should bring us back into the positives again.

Without thinking about it much, I had set Moscow on building stables which was probably a :smoke: decision. We have too many units anyway at the moment and won't build more horse-based ones in the near future. Is there hammer decay in Civ 5? If not, the next player might consider changing production.

St. Petersburg is building a circus to deal with our happiness situation. At +3 happiness for 4 gold upkeep, it's less efficient than a colliseum at +4/4, but those will come later.

Research is currently on Writing, for libraries. I think we should go for Iron Working next, for Catapults and Swordmen.

We should discuss what to do with Edirne and Istanbul. My suggestion would be to raze Edirne and annex Istanbul - what do you think? I didn't want to decide something big like this on my own.

We also have lots of money to spend. Allying with Helsinki is very expensive, now that they are at -56 or so. If we want to do this, we should probably save more money until we reach 1000 gold. Until then, Helsinki will be less hostile. On the other hand, there might be more useful things to spend our money on, like libraries or a settler for the whale site (what tech do we need for whales? Optics?) or...?

Here's the overview map:



We have a scout at New York's borders. Behind the city, there's still fog to reveal - unfortunately, Washington does not have Writing yet. So once we have, I suggest negotiating open borders with him so our scout can move through his territory.

Roster:
Kylearan -> just played
Aretii -> UP
SleepingMoogle -> on deck
Gold Ergo Sum
MuLepton
 

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lurker's comment:
Remember, Helsinki wants Lhasa destroyed, maybe that's what you'd wanna do next.
Great game so far!
 
lurker comment:

Is there hammer decay in Civ 5? If not, the next player might consider changing production.

What do you mean 'hammer decay'? Is that losing all your hammers from current project when you switch to a new production? If that's it, then why does it matter if you lose hammers, is it considered better to keep going on a unneeded project than switch to something necessary and 'waste' some hammers?

That's an honest question, cause this is just a new term/concept to me.

Cool game to watch, too. Istanbul looks like it could be a real nice city spot to annex. Fish, river farms and nice +hammers from UA on the double horses, not bad.
 
Is there hammer decay in Civ 5? If not, the next player might consider changing production.

Yes, there is hammer decay. Not sure what the rate of it is, but items seem to start losing hammers after about ~10 turns. I know this because one of the strategies that I have begun doing, when I have nothing else to build, is to build all relevant military units until there is only one turn left, and then just keep them in the queue to rush out in one turn if I have to go to war, saving me the unit maintenance cost that I would suffer if I actually built them. But I have to go back through every few turns and put another turn of work into the units to keep them at 1-turn builds.

My suggestion would be to raze Edirne and annex Istanbul - what do you think?

Edirne isn't providing us very many workable tiles that we cannot get with St. Pete and Istanbul, so from that perspective, it isn't that useful. But according to the new theory of ICS for this game, if you build a colosseum, market, bank (plus trade route), library and monument (finished in 4-turns), then every city is a net positive if you don't grow it past size 4. So it might be worth keeping, even if mostly useless tile wise. The one major downside to raizing it, is it might be quite a few turns before we can claim the silks otherwise, and we are already having happiness problems. But if there is a better city site to be claimed down below, we should probably raize it and put up the better city, to avoid the extra "occupied" city population happiness penalty. Just be aware that Washington, and maybe some other AIs, are likely to get pissy over our raizing the city.

Also, I firmly support dropping the hammer on Lhasa to get good relations with Helsinki.
 
You have quite lot of horsies :)
 
The one major downside to raizing it, is it might be quite a few turns before we can claim the silks otherwise, and we are already having happiness problems.

Yeah, that was why I decided to keep it initially - also, I could've sworn that the Silks said "Plantation" when I moused over them during my turns, so I thought they were hooked up already, weird.

I think we want to wait until we annex Istanbul until we can build Courthouses, don't we?

As for Lhasa - sure, why not. Just keep in mind we have to get past (hostile) Helsinki, plus we need to keep some defense at home, plus Washington might not like it (do other civs also pipe up with "That city state is in my region of influence" if you attack them or only if you try to befriend them?).
 
Just keep in mind we have to get past (hostile) Helsinki

It shouldn't matter if the city-state is hostile. It was at war with us only because of the Ottomans. That should mean we can get peace with Helsinki whenever we want, just by going through the Diplo screen and asking for it.
 
This is my got it. Midterm schedule is a little hectic, but I should be able to play sometime over the next 24 hours or so.
 
Wow, that is some location for New York. 12 tiles away from Washington! This game's AI... :smoke:
Not only that, but it also put Tenochtitlan exactly between Washington and New York. :rolleyes: I really liked how the Civ 4 AI handled finding new city sites. I mean, putting distance to the rest of your empire into the value computation formula for city sites isn't that hard to do... :rolleyes:
 
What do you mean 'hammer decay'?
Hammer decay is a term from Civ 4. If a city started to build something and then switched production to something different before the original build was complete, you started to lose hammers from your original build after some turns. Hammers of half-built units would start to decay earlier than those of buildings, probably to prevent you from pre-building an army without having to pay unit maintenance for it.
 
I think we want to wait until we annex Istanbul until we can build Courthouses, don't we?
Good point! That should be one of our next priorities, then.

As for Lhasa - sure, why not. Just keep in mind we have to get past (hostile) Helsinki

I've already made peace with Helsinki (see my report, turn 69 ;)).
 
Not only that, but it also put Tenochtitlan exactly between Washington and New York. :rolleyes: I really liked how the Civ 4 AI handled finding new city sites. I mean, putting distance to the rest of your empire into the value computation formula for city sites isn't that hard to do... :rolleyes:

No honestly, it looks exactly like distance factors into the value computation. :lol:
 
No honestly, it looks exactly like distance factors into the value computation. :lol:

Could it be that washington demands spices, so new york became vastly more interesting than it should've been? (the other AIs founded normally, apparently)
When a ressource is demanded, AIs will go crazy for it, it seems..
 
Nice work on the war everyone. :)

For now, we should focus on consolidating our gains before going to war again. I agree that razing Edirne and working towards Courthouses to eventually annex Istanbul is probably the best thing to do. We could also consider expanding to that western position in the last report, and east into the tundra depending on our needs.

But the most important thing is that we now control the northern portion of our continent, which is a pretty good position. :D

We should be able to absorb China fairly easily, since it's not very strong military, and boxed in by City-states without much room to expand. Washington might be a little more tricky, but if Monty goes to war with him we might be able to snatch an American city or two as well.
 
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