UNGY-04 Who do they think they are?

[SnowlyWhite]

looking at the map, I mean on the hill 2e from the cows; the city will be on hills(big +, another 25% defence), will grab wheat on 1st ring(great again) and bronze and cows on 2nd.

and then you have to keep checking for his galley; if it's one, it's a settler if it's more, well... he got bored

the plus being you'll block both ways with one border pop, both south and north

didn't know about cities having higher chance then scouts; thanks for the tip

archer, wall, hill, amphibious penality... you should last even against maces

and being expansive rocks due to cheap harbours too; just playing a mehmet which happened to be in the same situation and those harbours with glh assorted rock

 

[Rusten]

Is it worth beelining MC and trying for Colossus? Pottery is likely to be useful. MC gives us triremes which could also be useful as Shaka can only invade by sea which means galleys pre-astronomy.
Without bulbing astronomy is not something we'll be acquiring any time soon and the extra commerce from Colossus in the near future is likely to benefit us more than enhanced trade routes in the more distant future.

All good points--aiming for both wonders is worth considering. The Colossus helps getting the true power of the GLH up earlier and when it obsoletes we'll have something else for mojo. I usually don't aim for the Colossus as I try to lightbulb astronomy early on these kinds of maps, but here we're going to have to use commerce for it making the Colossus better than usual (which is also why I considered Oracle -> MC earlier but too late for that now anyway). The problem is MC is a pretty big tech, but I guess we can trade it to Shaka (there are some techs they'll trade in isolation). I'm pretty sure alphabet is one of them and I believe monarchy is too.

looking at the map, I mean on the hill 2e from the cows; the city will be on hills(big +, another 25% defence), will grab wheat on 1st ring(great again) and bronze and cows on 2nd.

That's the location I had in mind too. I didn't settle it as our 2nd/3rd city as we're lacking agriculture, but I'm all for it as our 4th.

 

[SnowlyWhite]

another great path, beside mc, would've been confu or taoism founding, since you'd get shaka's money too as it'd spread to him and well, it's not like hed ever found one... But with the no gp rule...

paci and cash, but I understand the idea is no gp...

 

[Rusten]

I'm off for a couple of days (http://oyafestivalen.com/pages/eng/1-news) with no computer access (probably) so don't expect any input from me until thursday/friday.

silverbullet is up; good luck with the next set.

 

[ungy]

OK--nicely done as usual Rusten.
Seems like we have a challenge on our hands here.
Lack of food to the south is a bummer--plain and simple.

The plan as I understand it:
found city 3 by the crab/cow to pop the hut.
found city 4 eventually to block zulu on the hill.
chop out the GLH.

As for the colosseus, I think it's pretty unlikely we could get it.
MC will be a long time as we are not going to research well for a while.
As for Zulu trading tech, I know the AI trades alpha, I can't remember if they trade monarchy but I think they might.

I guess there is a lot of variation on the colosseus--if we do make a play for MC we should research it at 0% until we can make a run at 100%--if it gets built elsewhere we want to be able to change to monarchy.

We can trade resources with Zulu--might as well.

the roster:

Ungy
Rusten--just played
Silverbullet--UP
Atropos--on deck
Mystyfly
Pigswill

 

[silverbullet]

Looks great, I will play this game tonight.
I think we should first chop GLH and only then found 4th city.
Where did we intend to block Shaka? on our island or his?

What should we research next? I think I will aim for writing to get open borders for trade routes. +9 commerce from trade routes per city will make any further research and expansion easier.
I think we have a fair chance for the colossus, and it makes sense to turn off research anyway while building a library in the capital, so it all works out nicely.

 

[ungy]

Looks great, I will play this game tonight.
I think we should first chop GLH and only then found 4th city.
Where did we intend to block Shaka? on our island or his?

What should we research next? I think I will aim for writing to get open borders for trade routes. +9 commerce from trade routes per city will make any further research and expansion easier.
I think we have a fair chance for the colossus, and it makes sense to turn off research anyway while building a library in the capital, so it all works out nicely.

I'm gone for 3 days and no civ ATM but:
I remembered Shaka as someone who needed a relations boost to OB--not sure if that is correct. We should trade him resources or gift him something.

Tech wise we are missing ag+ pottery--might make sense to get that as we get 1/2 price grannies and could use some cottages as well as get a writing discount from that. Need it for MC anyway.

 

[Rusten]

I'm back. I think the idea is to block/settle our next city next to the riverside wheat on the riverside grassland hill (picking up cows and bronze once the border pops).

 

[silverbullet]

Hi,
Sorry for not playing yet, i had some unexpected things to do.
I will play it in the next 2 hours or so.

 

[silverbullet]

Turn 65 - gift clams to Shaka

turn 67- masonry->wheel
Settle machu pichu east of the archer and get some gold from hut.
Turn 74 - GLH complete in Mutal. next is settler.


Turn 75 - a barbarian city spawns on a hill near us. I had to get my fogbusters away from there unfortunately to protect the lighthouse choppers.

Turn 78 shaka signs open borders. He scouted our 2 first cities so they both get +9 trade routes, but he doesn't have routes to machu pichu. Our workboat starts scouting his land

Turn 80 a good place to stop
We can research agriculture or writing next, but I would like to bring up the crazy idea of metal casting.
It will take 17 turns now if we work lake tiles, but once we build another city and scout more shaka land we will get better research than that.
I we wait for writing, build a library, turn research to 0% for a while, etc, I am not sure we can make it faster.
The risk is of course, that if we beeline now and lose the wonder we have wasted a lot of time.

NOTE: I am sorry for the lack of screenshots. I pressed printScreen during game and discovered that no screenshot was take

 

[mystyfly]

Finally checking in

I was very busy last week and will be away from tomorrow until the 16th *autoskip please*. I'm sorry.

I don't like colossus + glh as astro obsoletes the colossus but is a big boost for glh + very important on these maps. I'd say try to keep shaka off our conti to avoid close border -ves. Put up some commerce and some hammer cities and plan on taking on shaka with some kind of army. I like our island and the daring settler movements I never move the settlers when I see rarely no tiles of the new location. But going to the coast was great. Well, it somehow makes up for being isolated with shaka.

BTW wait with popping that barb hut until we have optics to get astro

 

[Rusten]

I don't like a war with Shaka. We'll have to cross the coast getting colonial maintenance and he makes a lot of units (and gets the free promotion). I think it's better to use him for trade routes as long as possible.

Shaka won't settle on our island once the 4th city pops its borders unless we're incredibly slow.

I'd definitely research agriculture next to get that wheat running for our 4th city. Writing or not is up for discussion. While it's great to get commerce amplifiers the other big thing about writing is getting that GS ready but that's obviously not something we're doing thus it's less of a priority. I am tempted to go agriculture -> MC. Even if we stop by writing getting libraries up everywhere will take a lot of time.

Good set btw, everything seems to be running smooth.

Edit: Atropos hasn't signed in yet either, so you might want to hang around pigswill. I'm guessing you might be up next.

 

[mystyfly]

I don't intend to war with shaka until later, probabely cavs or so. Just as a general plan...

Agri next definitely. Writing can wait but shouldn't be delayed too long as it's too much of a bottleneck tech.

 

[silverbullet]

One thing I forgot in my set was to build a monument in our 2nd city. It's not that critical, but I forgot it because I thought our unique building was a terrace, I always mix up Maya and Inca. Another mistake was the failure to fogbust and the barbarian city on hill that we have to deal with now. On the positive side it will get us the HE.

I think it's worth it to go for the colossus because it will get us astronomy faster. We can expand like crazy and work coast tiles for instant +4 commerce per tile. It would take us 30 turns to get the same output from cottages.

If we decide not to go for the colossus, we should consider settling a city or 2 on Shaka's island. Shaka won't have enough cities to provide external rates to all our cities (he needs to build 3 times the number of our cities), so we will eventually end up with many internal trade routes. Intercontinental will make those worth +2 instead of +1.
The risk is war with Shaka, so we would need to make sure we settle them on hills and build walls and have good defenders. Anyway, it's something to consider after our blocking city.

If not going for colossus we should consider writing->mathematics->construction->calendar for hapiness and commerce. Our unique building gives +3 happy faces, so monarchy is not a priority.

 

[Atropos]

Got it. As I understand it, the objective is to settle a blocking city and beelining construction. Do we have a dotmap somewhere?

 

[silverbullet]

Got it. As I understand it, the objective is to settle a blocking city and beelining construction. Do we have a dotmap somewhere?

We haven't agreed on construction yet. I still think metal casting is up for discussion.
Blocking city should be on the hill taking cow+wheat+bronze IMO.
Scouting of shaka's coast is a no brainer.
Agriculture next is obvious.

I think metal casting is worth it. We have copper and we have trees to chop (in our next city to settle), so I think we can grab colossus. After that we can just spam cities everywhere on the coast and get amazing research.

What do you think about my suggestion to settle Shaka's island with 1 or 2 cities?

 

[mystyfly]

I really don't like settling on shaka's island. It'll add useless -ves for close borders. These cities won't be much use anyway as we'll have to ship units there to defend from shaka and/or will be squashed by his culture. BTW we won't see when Shaka is in WHEOOH until we meet another AI...

 

[Atropos]

I think the metal casting debate is important - it could shape our entire tech path because of astronomy - so I'm loathe to play until I have a clearer mandate. Anyone else want to chip in?

 

[Rusten]

I'm no fan of settling on Shaka's island either. We have the opportunity to grab a pretty isolated city on a hill separating us by coast--this is very ideal, especially when you consider that we can't know when he goes into war-mode. If we're separated by coast we can see his ships coming a couple of turns earlier and whip some extra units if necessary.

I still like the MC gambit. If Shaka ever gets his hands on the alphabet we can use it for trades as well (or getting peace).

What does "-ves" mean?

[x-post.]

 

[say1988]

negatives.

in this situation the close borders diplomatic penalty.