RR12 - A perfect spy

[Brian Shanahan]

Have the save give me a while to look at it.

OK looking at the game, I still think that the next good site is the one I picked out for the Ivory, and with horses 1W of it it will be a strong production site. First build could be a stele.

I say keep on with the GWall, especially if we are going spy culture game. I can chop it out pretty easily with the worker in the cap. Or we can grow to four and whip out a second settler for the west. Though I think chopping out the wonder will be quicker (especially with no granary).
After the wall we should IMO go with worker/settler to grab some more land, though where I'm not sure of.

I think a good tech strategy could be wheel>pottery to get granaries up and running and start a slave economy while going for CoL. Other than that Oracling CoL would be a good idea (though it might be too late to start now).

I'll wait for thoughts on this.

 

[lymond]

I think the PH spot is looking a bit more attractive now - plenty of production, horsies, better defense, closer to Aztecs, and it saves the Sheep for another city down south. Might as well split the food in a food poor area.

We are Creative - I prefer Writing before pottery. Wheel definitely though.

Make sure you work gold this turn - doesn't effect food.

We should rush out some settlers

 

[Brian Shanahan]

I was thinking on getting the GWall and then rushing settlers. Without a granary I dnon't think it's all that effective whipping settlers into the wall.

About the ivory I'm not convinced. The sheep are in an akward position to share and there isn't really a good site with the sheep and hills, which will also give a good ivory site without mucho overlap.

Oh, and I'm assuming you meant affect rather than effect

 

[lymond]

As my granny used to tell me, "if you can't beat 'em, make a screenshot". She had a huge affect on me

Spoiler :

Basically, what I'm trying to show here is that these are viable sites, but also the importance of settling such that we setup culture paths to the AI. We might want to spread out just a little bit more than usual initially - less overlap.

The other sites are just me jacking around. The banana city might be best 1S.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Ok if you throw in a bag of sucky sweets you'll have me convinced.

Oh and the word you're looking for this time is bigstickwitharustynailinit

 

[nocho]

Hi guys, just chiming in to say I'd hate to not settle on the river, so fwiw my vote would be 1E of horse. GW is paramount, just chop it out asap, agree that without granary nor stone overflow tricks won't do much good here. Good luck.

 

[Thy_Spellcraft]

Hi guys, just chiming in to say I'd hate to not settle on the river, so fwiw my vote would be 1E of horse. GW is paramount, just chop it out asap, agree that without granary nor stone overflow tricks won't do much good here. Good luck.

If you put it 1E1S of the horses you'd get my vote as well! But still I think 1E or 1E1N of the phants should become our next site! In case we really want to spread culture as soon as possible towards mounty we should take one of the grass-hill spots NW of the ivory!

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Ok the game is played, nothing unexpected got the great wall and some techs.

So a quick run through:

Turn 36:
Move out the settler.
Stop the worker on the pigs.

Turn 39:
Found Gondar (in my original spot, sorry Lymond, still thought it stronger). Went with a worker as Myst wasn't in.

Turn 40:
Myst>Wheel. Gondar slots in the stele ahead of the worker.

Turn 43:
Wheel>Writing.
Any you were right Lymond:

Spoiler :

Turn 45:
Wang Kong wants Open Borders (he has writing). I decline because I don't want angry Monty, they're mutual worst enemies.

Turn 48:
I see trouble ahead:

Spoiler :

But we'll be safe

Turn 49:
The RNGods honour us with a big stone wall, before we even find a source:

Spoiler :

It took 3 chops 2 grassland rivers and 1 grassland beside the city.
Slotted a worker in at Aksum.

Turn 50:
Got writing and put in pottery. This is placeholder for now.
Theres 15 hammers in the worker with 11 IBT. It can be whipped for 2 pop into a settler with decent overflow.
Land:

Spoiler :

As regards resources it's fairly strong, but the tile distribution is a bit iffy, some judicious mapping is needed.

Thoughts for going forward:
Go settler spammy, gobble up some land and head fo CoL, and get a start on the spy economy.

 

[LKendter]

LOL - I can tell I haven't played in awhile.
Went to look at the game on my newish laptop, and Civ not installed!

 

[LKendter]

BLEH - running into issues trying to install Civ on laptop with Windows7.

Got base and Warlords installed. Put in disc 2 of BTS and got some weird fatal error message.

Can't tell if CD is defective, or what the issue is. Home next Saturday - I may have another disc to try if I keep spinning wheels.

WTH is general feature error?

 

[LKendter]

Tried again and once again:
Feature: Default Feature
Component
File
Error: Catastrophic failure

 

[LKendter]

I'm on auto-skip until at least May 7.

Did research and there was a bad batch of disks out there. My out of town copy was a second copy to get a disk 1 to play the game before the NO CD patch was added. I never realized I had one of the bad disk 2 copies.

The only way I can play before then is if someone knows a way to get a download of CD1 and CD2 so that I can install on laptop.

 

[Thy_Spellcraft]

I'm sorry LK but I don't have any idea to help you..

But on the set: I'm a way surprised to see the city on THAT spot.. I thought we'd go for the ivory one..
And as it seems I'm bit noobish but please could anybody explain to me why the fu***** hell we didn't build the city 1S of the current spot? It has a way better production and would leave the ivory spot to get settled as well!
The rest of the set seems to be well done.. Good to see noone beat us to GW.. Time to get the EPs running!
And I think we need to select our first victim to concentrate our EPs on him!

 

[Thrar]

I'm fine with the current spot for the second city. Settling 1S to leave the ivory for later means that the ivory city would be low on food; there is no fresh water anywhere near and sharing the corn means lots of overlap. What we have now is a very strong city with good food and production that will be excellent throughout the game.

Regarding next settling locations, do we want to move aggressively towards Monty or settle in all directions first?
For general growth, I like the pig/copper/wheat spot to our E, settling 2E of the wheat would serve as a decent outpost towards Korea in that direction. We could follow that one up with 1N of the northernmost of the 3 lakes (W of the cow) for 4 more resources, pretty much sealing our east against Korea. These two cities connect well to each other by culture, so we don't need to worry about moving our troops around there.

I don't think settling further away is a good idea; if we can't connect the new city culturally, it needs to produce all its military by itself, which won't be sufficient if it's in an aggressive location. A bit more scouting W of Gondar might be useful, maybe we should build a new scout for that? We know very little of the land towards Monty and what we can see is weak food-wise, before finding out more I don't think we should settle there.

What is the reasoning for building a stele in Gondar? I don't think it will ever participate in the culture war with Monty and the next border expansion should come in time for when we need it anyway. I would have preferred a scout instead; in fact, I think we should put it on hold and slot the worker back in or build a scout instead.

Why does Aksum have a mine on a grassland hill, but not on the second gold hill? 6 commerce are way better than 1F at this point IMO. After the pasture is done, the worker should head over there and fix that - I wouldn't even waste time on roading the pigs.
Speaking of Aksum, do we want a library for all that commerce there?

What about EP distribution? Is it wise to spread them out as we do at the moment? Monty and Kon are our immediate neighbors, should we focus on them - or even just one of them - for now?

 

[r_rolo1]

Ok, I'm sort of back ( I was able to conenct yerterday, but the net was very unstable :/ )

I sitll have not seen the save ( and will not see it today ... tired , so tired :/ ). But is good to see the GW on the bag

Ok, on roster duties:

r_rolo1
Thy_Spellcraft
Brian Shanahan -just played
lymond - UP
Thrar - on deck
LKendter - autoskip up to 7 of may
nocho

 

[lymond]

ok...got it...

here's a bit of a plan

First, I'm providing a screenshot here with some marked spots for potential next cities. A,B and C are all strong next spots. C and D will need to be settled somehow even though they are weak on food early, but decent production later. C is probably better. B is strong but is off the coast, which is not that big a deal. A grabs marble.

Spoiler :

Overall, I plan to keep improving the land. We need workers bad so I will continue with those builds. I hope to get out at least 1 city this turnset.

Current worker will finish pigs and move to Gondor to start improvements.

Worker from Aksum will chop a settler, worker and library and then improve gold and copper.

I don't normally build scouts, but I will try to get one out since I guess it's the only guy that can explore for us.

Oh...on a side note...I would like some clarification on the variant for me and the team - or just clueless me. Is the deal that our military can't leave our borders even to attack such that our culture needs to be adjacent to an AI city? If so, I guess that means we will need to settle some cities right on AI borders eventually.

 

[r_rolo1]

Oh...on a side note...I would like some clarification on the variant for me and the team - or just clueless me. Is the deal that our military can't leave our borders even to attack such that our culture needs to be adjacent to an AI city? If so, I guess that means we will need to settle some cities right on AI borders eventually.

Quoting the variant rule ...

Our troops can't leave our territory ( except to cover for settlers )

In other words, we can't attack a unit if the end result is that we we will leave a unit out of our land as the end result of the attack. That means that , yes, we will probably need some judicious settling ...

About the plan, from my part you have a green light

 

[lymond]

I'd like to get the turnset done this evening, so try to get comments in soon. Not sure if I will get out a settler or not this turnset, but thoughts on the next city site should be discussed. I'm leaning towards option A.

 

[r_rolo1]

I'm also for A ( I thinked I had said it in my previous post ... :/ )

 

[nocho]

My first thought was A to have marble for the Oracle. But it takes quite some worker-turns to quarry marble and have a road connecting to it, especially if we don't want to build it in A itself, but in Aksum or Gondar instead. So I think we might better just chop out the Oracle without marble. Saves us researching masonry for now as well. Maybe Gondar can do it, it has forests and horse- and jumbo-tiles and some mines help with decent production.

Anyway, if we don't want marble for Oracle, I'm inclined to settle C, looks like a pretty good early town, grabs land that might be taken by Wang soon as well if we don't take it. And if we settle C, A will be pretty save, or we might even relocate it for a (mediocre) town more east that'd grab marble, deer and wine. Anyway, it feels like grabbing C is a bit more "tactical".

I'm also thinking it'd be nice to grow Aksum to the happy cap and just continuously spit out workers and settlers for now. It has 4 excellent tiles plus the decent river mine, so not really a need to whip it. Then we won't need a granary any time soon here either. If cap is indeed on worker/settler duty for quite some time (with chops coming in meanwhile), Oracle in Gondar makes even more sense. Gondar meanwhile could produce some warriors for escort service and the odd scout.

On the rules, as extra clarification, if I understood rolo correctly, we cannot even ever capture cities. We can attack from a nearby tile (under our control) but will have to leave the last man standing... Everything has to flip eventually.