Turn Tracking Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 87 - 700BC

Wherein our good luck keeps getting even better.



I moved our scout in CFC territory first. As mostly_harmless posted above, CivFanatics built a Jewish temple in their capital and double-whipped a Jewish missionary in Daivagati. Two curious decisions. Both justifiable, with the missionary going to pop borders in another city and CFC being Spiritual for the cheap temples, but still a bit curious nonetheless. If I were them, I would simply tech Monarchy and use my free swap to Hereditary Rule civic. Good news for us though! No settler appears imminent in the border region.

I moved the settler E-NE to reveal Raj, the sixth CivFanatics city. This city is size 1, was founded nine turns ago on T78, has no completed buildings, and doesn't have any defenders inside. Not the best management by their civ here; Forbidden Fruit was founded five turns later and is size 2 with a granary already chopped out. I guess we'll find out more as we keep exploring. After taking this picture, I moved the scout SW-SE to stay on the road network. We should find another city next turn as we continue mapping out the CFC core.

For anyone wondering, I didn't take the picture with the resource icons on because the silks completely obscured vision on Raj. The city has silks and iron that we can see, and shares a sheep resource with Daivagati.

The biggest news of the turn was at the barb city, where it grew perfectly to size 2 with a single warrior remaining on defense. We had 99% odds with our City Raider II axeman, and so...



Alemanni is ours! Thanks, Dantski. Now for the unexpected bonus: the city has a gems resource under the jungle hill N-NE of the city. So this city actually comes with grassland pigs, clams, gems, a floodplains tile, six riverside tiles, and four grassland hills. This is a very, very high quality city. If the other teams knew how this dropped into our laps effectively for free, they'd be pretty pissed off right now.



Here's a larger view of the area with the resource icons turned on. We also had the 500 culture border pop take place at Mansa's Muse between turns, defogging one completely unremarkable jungle tile in the north. The extra barb visibility is appreciated, and it let Forbidden Fruit work the floodplains tile this turn as well. The workers in this area finished the road on the bananas tile and made halfway progress on the spices plantation (2/5 turns). It will finish next turn as a bunch of cities grow.

There's a new worker out of Mansa's Muse, Worker K if I have the lettering correct. (Why don't we have a Worker "I"? Seems kind of silly that we are one letter off, makes counting the total number harder for no reason. I don't get it.) The plans I have suggest moving this worker SE and putting a turn into a plains cottage there, but I wasn't sure if there was a revised suggestion for this worker. There was some discussion about doing something different. I've left the worker unmoved for the moment pending confirmation on its assignment.



The west is rather quiet this turn. The axe and spear in the northwest are healing for the moment. I moved our axe in the far west a tile northeast as requested, revealing nothing of any interest. I'm assuming we go northwest next turn onto the plains hill tile, even if more forests will limit what we see. In the south, I'm keeping the Gourmet Menu axe stationed halfway between that city and Seven Tribes on zone defense. We don't need military police happiness in GM just yet, and I'd rather have the axe able to move around as barbs dictate. The Seven Tribes axe with 8 experience is moving back into our borders to heal up to full strength.

Workers in the north moved to plantation the bananas at Tree Huggers. That's another halfway (2/5) completed job that will be completed next turn. One worker en route from Horse Feathers completed a cottage at Tree Huggers that the city will grow onto in the future. Workers in the south built half a road on the Seven Tribes wheat and made more progress on another floodplains cottage for Gourmet Menu.



This picture is an example of why double-whipping a worker when Expansive is almost always a good idea. We get 11 bonus production from our trait which is all sorts of awesome.

The overview has a couple things of note. We double-whipped the galley in Horse Feathers, which will allow us to overflow into settler and complete it next turn for the stone spot. Note also the tile micro in this area: with more happiness coming online, the capital has taken over the corn resource from Horse Feathers and will grow rapidly to size 9. Gourmet Menu also borrows the iron for this turn as Horse Feathers regrows between turns. Seven Tribes is working the plains cottage over the wheat resource this turn for granary food box purposes that involve slightly complicated math. I'll let T-Hawk or Seven explain why it's better. Tree Huggers is finally poised for rapid growth with the bananas plantation about to finish next turn. Focal Point begins the long journey towards Mausoleum; there will be much chopping and whip overflowing into this wonder.

Naturally we finished Calendar research between turns and have overflowed 52 beakers into Currency. The plan is to have it completed eot 92. We grow 3 more pop next turn, we now have the most cities in the game with 9, and we're about to get a major influx of happiness with silks and spices. Times are good in the Realms Beyond.



And we are #1 in GNP for the moment with 0% research. Word.

I'm going to take another look at tracking production in enemy cities later today, but I think that's all for the moment.

[Sullla]

Turn 88 - 675BC

This turn was mostly uneventful. We did connect our first Calendar resource though, so yay for that.



I moved the CFC scout first, and uncovered the city of Mantra. This was their third city to be founded (order: Indira, Terasvin, Mantra, Daivagati) and it has granary and monument inside. Note that there is also a Jewish missionary standing inside the city, which will probably be used to spread religion on this current turn. There was also a chariot inside Daivagati at the start of the turn. This tells us that CFC does have horses connected somewhere, and the 4k Power increase that kjn noted in the Demographics must have come from this chariot's construction.

CFC gave us instructions on where to move to meet Spanish Apolyton. Although they did it in those awful keyboard numbers that I hate ("go 3-3-9-9"), the gist of their instructions was that Spanish Apolyton is located to their east and slightly to their north. Of course, we have no intention of leaving their territory until we've mapped out all seven CFC cities, and I knew that there was another city down to the south, so I sent the scout off in the other direction instead:



If they would ask about the scout, tell them that the turnplayer didn't read their message until after moving. It's almost true. Note that there is a German quechua moving around down here as well. There's a road on the hill tile two east of Terasvin which surely leads to another CFC city. I plan to follow that road, reveal whatever city is down there, and then swing to the northeast to go check out the Spanish.

There is a second Jewish missionary inside the city of Terasvin. CFC looks to be dealing with the happiness crunch on this map by spreading their religion around and then building cheap Spiritual temples. They are likely also researching towards Monarchy/Hereditary Rule, given that they have Priesthood and Monotheism techs. It's a good plan, and a good use of their Spiritual trait to lean a bit on religion.

The good news for us is that they don't seem to be in any hurry to settle cities along our border region. Check out that wide-angle map again: not even one city planted to the west of their capital so far. Everything has gone to the east. Note that the stone region is still a good 8 tiles away from any of their other settlements. We look to be in better and better shape to dictate terms in this region if we want to do so. I don't feel that CFC should be able to ignore this area indefinitely and still have claim to all that territory.



Elsewhere, the biggest happening was the free spread of religion into Tree Huggers. Note the tiny little Hinduism symbol up there, it wasn't present last turn. This is pretty nice just for expanding the border of Tree Huggers that much faster, from 3 culture/turn up to 4 per turn. The city will hit the 100 culture mark in 14 more turns. Workers in the area finished the long-awaited banana plantation, and Tree Huggers suddenly has +6 food surplus. This will be an absolute monster city one day with all the jungle chopped down and converted into cottages or workshops (the city has 13 flat grassland tiles).

The spear and axeman in this region are still healing, both about halfway there. A new axe was born in Tree Huggers and began moving to Horse Feathers to board the galley there next turn. HF completed a galley and overflowed into a settler, which it will complete with no overflow whatsoever:



37 foodhammers needed, 37 foodhammers produced. This is what simming and planning will do for you.



In the northwest we did not find anything of interest with Wyn. I plan to move northwest again next turn, which will reveal at least five more tiles. We are three turns away from founding the stone city.



Down in the southwest, we have vision of another barb warrior trickling in to provide us with XP #9 on axeman Lew. Still a couple of turns away. I have not moved our axeman so far this turn, and I'm not sure that we should move Lew. It might be best just to heal in place until that barb warrior arrives, because a turn moving into our territory is a turn spent not healing. We heal 10% of max health (0.5 health) in neutral territory, 15% (0.75 health) inside our borders, and 20% (1.0 health) inside one of our cities. Also bear in mind that the borders of Seven Tribes will expand eot 89, which will then place Lew inside our own territory. I am leaning towards keeping him in place right now, although we would be in a slightly awkward position if there is a barb warrior on the tile NW-W of the wheat this turn. Alternately, we can always move onto the wheat, which is now roaded. Thoughts?

The other axe had to move into Gourmet Menu to serve as military police. Upon hitting size 6, it went up to +2 unhappiness from lacking a unit (instead of the initial +1 unhappiness), which meant that even connecting spices wasn't enough to pacify the city. The workers in this area finished the wheat road and finished the floodplains cottage, just in time for Gourmet Menu to work the tile. GM is now working 5 riverside Financial cottages and the clams. Quite a city after its slow start.

Overview:

Tile micro is largely straightforward. The capital grew to size 7, which meant that it took over the non-river grassland cottage from Horse Feathers, which picked up a coastal tile in exchange. The 2/0/3 coastal tile is still a pretty good one to work. Horse Feathers also needs the iron resource in order to complete its settler. Forbidden Fruit has the choice of floodplains tile (3/0/1) or plains spices (2/1/5) to go along with its corn resource, but the city stil grows to size 4 on the same turn regardless of which one it works, so we are taking the superior overall yield of the spices tile. Forbidden Fruit expands borders next turn to pick up the banana tile and the second jungle spice in the north. Alemanni comes out of revolt the turn after that. Our borders continue to zerg their way across the map.

The only thing I don't like in our micro plan is the idea to hold Mansa's Muse at size 5 and slow-build another worker at 10 foodhammers/turn over the next 6t. I feel like there has to be a more efficient use of the city than that, given how we can simply grow two sizes and double-whip a worker as Expansive. I might try to take another look at this before the next turn rolls.



The Demos are very, very dominant. We are far ahead in Food and leading the game in GNP at 0% research. Our 100% research rate on Currency gives us GNP value of 175. We're equal to or above the Rival Best in nearly every category; the "Population" stat looks bad only because CivFr has two size 9 cities. In the more accurate Total Pop stat, we are comfortably in front:

RB: 36
UniCiv: 33
CivFr: 31
CFC: 29
Apol: 24
CivPl: 23
WPC: 20
SpAp: 19
Ger: 16

We grow 2 pop next turn and 3 more pop the turn after that. We settle our 10th city in three turns; currently, UniversCiv has 8, CFC has 7, and no one else has more than 6. We're the only team to research three Classical techs. We are significantly ahead of everyone else in score, and there's not much we can do to hide this. Our team is continuing to move towards a dominant position.

[Sullla]

Turn 89 - 650BC

Yeah, this was a really uninteresting turn. They can't all be edge of your seat excitement.



Probably the most interesting stuff came from our scout in CFC territory. I moved along their road through the hills and forests of southern CivFanatica, winding up at the other end in the city of Lakshmi. This is their seventh and most recent city, size 2 with no infrastructure as yet. The Jewish missionary produced in Terasvin last turn moved here and will probably spread religion for a border expansion. Note that there is a barb city to the immediate south of Lakshmi, only three tiles away from the CFC city. Should we send the scout down there next turn to check that out (moving southeast and seeing what's there before moving again), or should we head off to the northeast to head towards Spanish Apolyton and CFC's last city? Let me know what you think.

CFC chopped a forest last turn with their Fast Workers (the forest two east of Terasvin) which turned into a Jewish Temple at the start of this turn. This looks like their plan to deal with their happiness issues, spread religion and build their cheap Spiritual temples. It's not a bad plan at all, but it's also a weaker option than teching to Calendar and simply connecting more happiness resources. CivFanatics is a very likely candidate to try for the Apostolic Palace, which would synergize well with those temples of theirs. We will have to keep an eye on this and decide if we want to try and block that later. It would be very much like their team to try and win a cheezy AP victory.



Here is the northwest. Our Woodsman axe will finally be healed up enough to go out exploring again next turn (4.3 health now, will be 4.8 health next turn). Axeman Wyn in the extreme west continues to find little on the upper stretches of that river. I would like to move southwest next turn... but this runs the risk of CivPlayers potentially seeing our unit one turn before we plant our stone city. Here's my suggestion: I'll wait to move Wyn until the very end of the turn timer. We know that the German team won't ever end their turn, so why not use this to our advantage. I can move the unit at end of turn, and if CivPlayers can see our unit, no big deal. We'll already have played the following turn and founded stone city before they log into the game. Feels like the best option to me since moving in any other direction other than southwest wouldn't be that useful here.

Settler finished in Horse Feathers boarded the galley with an axeman for protection. They will land next turn and found the stone city on T91. We seemed to have a strong consensus that the stone location was better than suggested alternate locations. We can't see any barbs right now in the southwest, and our Shock axe down there spent the turn healing.



The eastern half of our territory was also very quiet. No barbs in sight, our cities in continued builder mode. Alemanni comes out of resistance next turn, making next turn a good time to rename it if desired. Possible suggestions: Splendid Isolation, Eastern Gem Dealers, Friendly Takeover, and Holiday Surprise. I think I like Eastern Gem Dealers the best, as it fits almost perfectly here. The stone city is already nominated to become Brick By Brick.

The one unit left unmoved at present is the new worker out of Mansa's Muse, Worker L. There was some disagreement over what to do with this worker; the old plan was to move SE and finish the non-river plains cottage. It's not the most useful tile at 1/1/1 though... Let me know what the best plan is for this guy before I end our turn. Keep in mind that we'll be whipping Worker M out of Focal Point next turn, as that should also factor into our worker plans for this area. We are pretty much set on worker actions for all other regions right now.

Here's our overview and tile micro for the turn. Workers in the east finished clearing the jungle on the banana tile at Forbidden Fruit; they will complete the plantation next turn. Workers in the north repositioned towards Horse Feathers, completing 3/4 of a cottage along the way. Workers in the southwest built half of a grassland cottage and will finish it next turn. One other worker is repositioning towards Adventure One to build another grassland cottage there.

Interesting tile stuff... Mansa's Muse is building another 6t worker at 8 -> 10 production/turn (Expasive!) in a food-neutral configuration. Focal Point is working an unimproved plains forest this turn for lack of other tiles before it gets whipped next turn. We can finish that crummy plains cottage if desired, but it's not really that much better. The 1/2 plains forest tile gets the city up to exactly 8 production for the same Expansive bonus again; it's effectively a 1/3 tile in this situation versus the potential 1/1/1 non-river plains cottage. Not worth it, in my opinion.

Four different cities grow next turn (Adventure One, Horse Feathers, Gourmet Menu, and Tree Huggers). HF gives up the iron this turn because it will be one food short of growing if it doesn't. Gourmet Menu picks it up for extra production towards library. Seven Tribes is working a plains cottage over the wheat tile for granary food box purposes (it will run Avoid Growth next turn for the same reason). Seven Tribes will also pop borders next turn, giving us much-needed barb visibility down there.



Since this is such a slow turn, here's a few bonus stats. We have killed 22 barb warriors so far in this game. Only loss was the initial starting warrior. RIP dude. Units thus far have been 3 warriors, 8 axes, 1 galley, 8 settlers, and 11 workers. That's not quite a farmer's gambit, but it's definitely growth-oriented. We've built 7 granaries, 3 libraries, 9 free obelisks, 1 lighthouse, 1 Stonehenge, and 1 Hindu Shrine. Nice.



Demos continue to show the very big lead in Food and GNP as before. Our values in GNP are as follows:

100% = 178
60% = 158 (break-even)
0% = 129 (still #1)

Not bad. Noteworthy here is that whoever is Rival Best in Production went way up between turns, up from 40 -> 47 production. We were also passed in Soldier count by another team, probably WPC rearming in their ongoing war. CivFr now has a size 10 capital and a size 9 second city, which is playing havoc with the Population stat. While that might sound intimidating, our capital will also be size 10 in just five more turns... although naturally we'll immediately double-whip it for yet another worker at that point, and then stagnate it at the happy cap while working 8 cottages.

Slow turn but we still do have some things up for discussion. Let me know your thoughts.

[Sullla]

Turn 90 - 625BC

It's extremely nice to have these turns roll roughly every 48 hours for a change. No thanks to German team, who again didn't end their turn, but WPC has been playing and ending turn almost immediately. I saw them in-game and thanked them for playing so quickly, said we all appreciated it, but they did not respond. In any case, we are currently playing turns at a semi-regular speed.



There wasn't much interest in heading south to check out the barb city, so I moved our scout up to the northeast. CFC built a road on the floodplains with their workers last turn, leading to this interesting scene. They have a barb spearman incoming towards their territory, although their axe will probably swat it aside this turn. There are actually 5 different Fast Workers in this picture, three under the scout and two more to the east and west. They are doing some kind of weird naming scheme with them, mostly people associated with Realms Beyond for some reason. I did see one named after Plotinus though, who has nothing to do with RB, so I dunno. Not really that important.

From this spot, I moved NE-NW and took an overview shot:



We didn't find the last CFC city, but it has to be somewhere to the east or northeast. We did find pigs + gold resources at Mantra, making it the expected clone of Mansa's Muse. There are two major differences though. First of all, CivFanatics settled Terasvin as their second city, not the pigs/gold location. They didn't settle Mantra until T51, while we had Mansa's Muse settled on T34. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, their city of Mantra had no resources in its first ring, and CFC is not playing as a Cultural leader. They had to build a monument and then wait 10 turns for a border expansion in order to use those pigs and that gold. If they chopped out a monument on the very first turn, they still weren't able to use their gold resource until T62. We had our gold improved and being worked starting on T39. That probably made a large difference in our faster civ development.

We're back on CFC's road network and should have their last city revealed + contact with Spanish Apolyton in the next few turns.



Not too much up in the northwest this turn. Woodsman axe has finally finished healing and is moving out to do some more scouting. We'll get a little more vision there next turn. The consensus was not to move our axeman in the extreme west this turn, and meet CivPlayers next turn after founding Brick By Brick on the stone. That axe is standing around in place this turn. Settler/axe pair landed on the stone and will found our tenth city next turn.



In the southwest we have a more interesting tactical puzzle. The barb warrior continued moving forward and was joined by a barb spearman from the west. Axeman Lew is at 3.9 health this turn and will heal to 4.8 health (essentially full) if he rests in place again this turn. If we choose to attack the warrior, we will get about 99.6% odds this turn. I would recommend waiting and healing this turn though; if we're lucky, the barb warrior will move north onto the desert tile. More likely, it will move northeast onto the plains hill, but we'll have even better odds with Lew after healing a turn. I don't fancy the possibility of some ungodly terrible dice roll taking out our 8 XP axeman and the city of Seven Tribes. Better to wait and finish healing this turn.

Of course, that still leaves the incoming spearman, which Lew won't be in position to hit if he has to move to the eastern plains hill tile. There's a way to deal with this, however: move the axeman inside Gourmet Menu down to whack the barb spear. Now Gourmet Menu gets unhappy if we move out the axe (I checked it again this turn to make sure of that), but we can move down a warrior from Horse Feathers to stand around on military police duty for a couple of turns. Horse Feathers is fine on happiness, and it's pretty deep within our territory at this point. If some total disaster hit, we could always whip an axe too. Anyway, I have that warrior moving down to GM (arrowed in the above picture), which will let the GM axeman move across the river next turn, and then kill the spear when it moves onto the wheat on T92. It should all work out just fine. Really looking forward to getting a few War Chariots for zone defense though.



By the way, check out how well Gourmet Menu is developing. It grew to size 7 between turns, now working the clams and six riverside cottages. I could pretty much label this screenshot "why Financial trait + river = overpowered". It's simply impossible for a non-Financial leader to produce this kind of commerce in the early going. We've been milking the river tiles in our starting area for maximum value throughout the whole game thus far. If anyone wants to do a post-mortum of our success later, this would be Exhibit A.

Overview and tile micro for the turn. Our workers completed a banana plantation for Forbidden Fruit, knocked out 3/5 of a silks plantation at Horse Feathers, and finished a grassland cottage for Gourmet Menu, which was immediately worked on this turn. The only somewhat inefficient worker usage at the moment is the road being built on the pigs at Focal Point. I'm not 100% that this is the best use for this guy, but it was in the micro plan, and we will use that road later on to found our upcoming CFC border city, so why not. Focal Point itself was double-whipped this turn for its worker, the overflow going into Mausoleum. Note also that Alemanni was renamed Eastern Dealers (ED) as requested.

Four cities grew between turns, taking us up to 42 total pop, although two of that was then whipped away at Focal Point for an even 40 population points. This forced another round of tile shuffling; the bananas plantation at Forbidden Fruit allowed Mansa's Muse to take back its corn resource, which then allowed the capital to claim the deer tile. Adventure One has the deer and the corn right now for very rapid growth to size 9 and size 10. Focal Point works the leftover tiles in the east. Tree Huggers is using its three resources and two baby cottages, Horse Feathers reclaims the iron tile this turn, and Gourmet Menu is on max cottages/growth. Seven Tribes works both resources and runs Avoid Growth this turn for granary food box purposes. We'll take that off next turn and grow as usual.

Research is humming along at 165 base / 199 modified beakers towards Currency. We are right on pace to finish the tech eot 92, with one more turn of 100% research and then a reduced rate on the last turn. It's still going to be tricky getting a trade route connection to CFC, but our workers can probably get a road over to CivPlayers fairly easily since their city will be close to Brick By Brick. We might want to prioritize that while waiting for BBB's borders to pop and pick up the wheat.



Demos after whipping Focal Point, no score changes from anyone else since the turn roll so far. We're 30% ahead of the Rival Best in Food and almost 50% ahead of the Rival Best in GNP. Can't think of anything else to note here, just plain good all around.

Let me know your thoughts on that little situation in the southwest, otherwise everything looks pretty good to go for this turn.

[Sullla]

Turn 91 - 600BC

The turn that we met CivPlayers - although not quite in the way we intended.



First things first. We found the last CivFanatics city (Lana) over to the east where we knew it had to be located. The city is size 5 with a granary and Jewish temple inside. That temple has to be brand new, as the city has religion + temple but still hasn't popped borders yet. CFC seems to have a large number of floodplains tiles over there, and they are duly cottaging them up right now. From Lana, I moved the scout northwest-northwest in the hopes of spotting Spanish Apolyton borders soon.

Now over in the west, when I logged into the game I found that we had already met CivPlayers. As it turns out, their city popped borders between turns, and our axe actually met them without moving. They hadn't logged into the game yet at the start of the turn, so I moved west as planned and took this picture:



Their city happens to be on a hill, which means that we have visibility on the center tile. Size 2, planted on a wines resource, a monument inside and nothing else in terms of buildings, with a single warrior for defense. That should be a fun moment for them when they log in this turn, seeing our axe right next to their city. We kind of have them by the balls here, so feel free to use this in diplomacy. I have a feeling they might be amenable to an NAP right about now.

We also planted Brick By Brick on the stone as planned, taking us up to 10 cities overall. UniversCiv has 8 cities and I don't think anyone else has more than 7. This was great news, as we finally secured our own source of horses, stone, and wines. The bad news is that the new city borders revealed some more Aztec culture down to the south. Looks like that western city we were thinking about earlier today won't be happening:



As best I can tell, their city is on the plains hill tile I marked in white. Such a shame, the spot one tile south of the wines would have made a really nice border city for us, and established the river as the dividing line between us and CivPlayers. Ah well. We should still be able to get another city west of Seven Tribes - what do we think would be the best spot? Time to discuss that as a group.



In the southwest I attacked with Lew and we won flawlessly, no damage taken. Now sitting at 9 XP and almost a lock for Heroic Epic territory. If for some reason the barb spearman would move north or east next turn, we can wait and kill it with Lew for the final experience point. Assuming the more likely scenario where the barb moves onto the wheat, we'll kill it with the other axe. Even if we would lose that battle at 1% odds or whatever, we still wouldn't lose the city. This area looks good.

Overview/tile micro:

There actually isn't much change in the tile micro this turn. We only grew one pop point, at Forbidden Fruit, and that works a plains forest hill (0/3) for the Expansive worker bonus. Everything else is exactly the same as last turn. I still don't know where that warrior out of Mansa's Muse is supposed to go. The unit is unmoved, let me know what everyone had in mind there.

We produce 169 base / 202 modified beakers this turn towards Currency. We'll be able to finish easily next turn at 50% rate with room to spare. (In the test sim, we could run 40% science and still get the tech.)



Start of turn Demos. I've reassigned our Espionage points towards CivPlayers for now to try and get their bar graphs.

I don't have much to add here right now. The turn rolled late at night and I'm feeling a bit drained. The main tasks for the team right now should be sending off some kind of message to CivPlayers and thinking about how to redo our dotmap in the far west. We're planting another city over there in about 5-6 turns, making now the time to establish where it's going. Really going to miss that spot we didn't get.

[Sullla]

Turn 92 - 575BC

Another new turn. These 48 hour turns are so much nicer to play. Not too likely that the German team will end turn again though (it was an accident last turn).



We didn't find too much in CFC territory this turn, although knowing the location of their horses has to be somewhat useful. Based on the directions they gave us a couple of turns ago, Spanish Apolyton should be just to the east of that desert hill. I'll probably move the scout east across the river, then southeast onto the desert hill tile. While it's possible that we could run into a barb unit, I'll take our chances given that this area appears to be extremely close to the territory of two teams. We will probably make contact with Spanish Apolyton next turn or the turn afterwards.



I wasn't sure whether to move the Woodsman axe northwest or southwest on our turn. Northwest would reveal more tiles, so I ultimately decided to go in that direction. I thought we would be able to move down to the southwest as the axe moved along. Unfortunately, we found nothing up here and the range of peaks extends quite a long way, cutting off passage to the south. Not a great result, and I'm sure at least one person will second-guess this decision later in this thread.

Where to move the Woodsman axe from here depends on what we do with axeman Wyn, still sitting next to the CivPlayers border unmoved. If we get an Open Borders deal with CivPlayers, I'd like to move Wyn south into their territory and snoop around to see what they have. If we can't get them to agree to Open Borders, or we sign one with a no-scouting agreement, then Wyn can go defog the northern edge of the lake while the Woodsman axe heads even further northwest to search for Apolyton. That's not such a bad result either.

Long story short, we want to try and figure out if CivPlayers is willing to sign Open Borders and/or allow a scouting unit in their territory as soon as possible. I'd like to request that our diplo team make a request along these lines before this turn ends.



The barb spearman moved onto the wheat tile as expected, which means that we'll still need to find one more battle for axeman Lew to hit 10 XP. I don't think that will be much of a problem, given all the barb activity we've seen. Our other axe attacked and killed the spear without issue, gaining 2 XP and a promotion in the process. Obviously we didn't have much of a choice here, we didn't want to see the wheat get pillaged and we wanted to work that tile this turn.



Here's a shot of the eastern part of our territory; it's very quiet, just wanted a closer image for the lurkers. I like how we have workers in production at three different cities in this screenshot alone. We have 12 workers right now, and workers #13 and #14 will be finishing next turn. That's pretty impressive this early in the game, and I've rarely had this many workers to play around with on T92, but then again I've rarely had 10 cities, Stonehenge, and Currency tech all in hand before 500 BC either. I wish we could somehow see how many workers the other teams had at this point, would be interesting information.

In that picture around Focal Point, one worker is roading towards the upcoming pink dot location and another worker moved onto the forested hill tile S-SW of the city to mine/chop it. We should be able to tweak things so that we don't finish the chop (into Mausoleum) until after we're in Organized Religion civic for the bonus. Micro past T96-97 is still up in the air at this point.

Since there's not a ton taking place on this turn, let's look in detail at one city: Horse Feathers.



We're in pretty clear consensus that this will be our Moai city, and we'll be getting started as soon as we have the stone. Amusingly enough, we actually have stone under Brick By Brick, but it is *NOT* connected at the moment because we haven't researched Masonry tech. Anyway, that's getting fixed as soon as we're done Currency. Horse Feathers has 7 tiles that will benefit from Moai (remember the 3 food lake tile gets the bonus as well), and even if some other city would potentially get more benefit 50 turns later, it's better to build the wonder now and have it in place quickly. Horse Feathers with Moai goes from becoming a decent city to a very strong unit producer, one of the best in our territory.

I've drawn in some of the long term tile assignment in this area. We need to run an irrigation chain up to that rice tile, and the tiles marked with "F" are the most logical ones to farm. (That white dot city will be very strong in time, but it will also require a metric ton of worker labor to clear out the jungle. I think 19 of the 21 tiles right now are jungle!) Most of the grassland tiles between Adventure One and Horse Feathers will eventually go over to the capital as cottages, and since there's no river up here, Horse Feathers works best as a production city. Here's what that could look like with some Worldbuilder fun:



Even with leaving the corn tile to the capital, I can get 29 base production here at size 17 with extra food to spare. (Assuming we can manage the requisite health and happiness to go with the pop.) I'd actually like to suggest using Horse Feathers as our Heroic Epic city to go along with Moai; with the iron resource and four hill tiles, the production here is very good. It's the same deal as Moai: even if we could get a better spot later on in the game, we could probably have Moai and Heroic Epic up here together by about T130, and then go all units for the rest of the game. Most of our other cities have too many riverside tiles, which practically demand mass cottages and less production as a result. Horse Feathers fits nicely here, plus it even has the perfect name for a Heroic Epic city. Any thoughts on this?

Overview / tile micro:

Not too much in the way of change here. Adventure One grew to size 9 and picked up a brand new non-riverside grassland cottage. Seven Tribes grew to size 3 and added another new grassland river cottage. We also double-whipped Forbidden Fruit for a worker, with plans to save the overflow via Wealth build into another worker in a few turns. Three cities grow next turn and we discover Currency tech, which will mean a lot of score points. Not much chance of staying anonymous in this game.

We easily complete Currency this turn at 50% research, with a fair amount of overflow going into Masonry next turn. Note that we are still running a profit at 50% science despite our 10 cities and the Emperor + Toroidal maintenance costs. Looking forward to grabbing another trade route in all 10 cities next turn. Since the Germans have 6 cities and WPC has 5 cities, we should get one more intercontinental trade route followed by nine domestic ones. Connecting to the seven cities of CivPlayers would be very nice indeed.



Early turn Demographics. This is after I whipped at Forbidden Fruits, but before anyone else even logged into the game. Should be good. We are actually still #1 in GNP even at 0% research, and that Food stat has me jumping for joy every turn.

CivFr grew their first city and second city between turns, now sitting at size 11 and size 10. They are either getting a ton out of Hereditary Rule civic or they've already teched Construction and built some ball courts. CivFr has emerged as our clear rival by a wide margin; they are the only ones keeping pace in population and research. The good news is that they are growing vertically and not horizontally; the latter almost always wins out in the end in Civ4, all other things being equal. Having 10 cities to their 7 is a very good sign. CivFr also has barely whipped at all, while we've whipped almost nonstop and still have more total pop than their team. Although I definitely rate them as our top competitor, and I think they're playing a very strong game, I think our position is definitely better.

CivPlayers put up no less than 10 espionage points against us between turns (!) Looks like they have three sacrificial altars finished. Well, we won't be winning the EP battle with them any time soon. An EP spending agreement with them would be nice, since we definitely can't win an espionage battle against them at present.

Most of our to-do list still involves getting another diplo message out to CivPlayers and figuring out where we're settling in the southwest. We can discuss this more in the dotmapping thread, but I think we'll have to settle on the tile southwest of the clams. It sucks, it's a weak city, but planting only 3 tiles away from CivPlayers is not going to be acceptable diplomatically. We can at least use the clams tile to grow and then make the most of the rest of the terrain. Serious overlap in that area, unfortunately, I just don't see an alternative. We don't want Seven Tribes to be on the front lines. Better to have a largely crummy city out beyond it to serve as our border. We can always build our very cheap walls (since we have stone) to discourage aggression.

Over to all of you guys for your thoughts and impressions.

[Sullla]

Turn 93 - 550BC

Nothing new revealed this turn, but many decisions still to be made.



Not all that much over in CFC territory defogged by our scout this turn. They told us we had to go north around those mountains to make contact so we'll keep working on that. Then it's further north to find UniversCiv, who is apparently also in the general area. If we could meet both of those teams with this scout, I'd consider that to be a big success.



I attacked the barb warrior that appeared with our Woodsman axe, and we did win, although we once again took high damage in the process. Sian dropped down to about 2 health despite 99.7% odds to win - what is it with this axe? Seems to have trouble winning extremely high odds battles. The only good news is that we once again received 2 XP and now sit at 4 XP overall, one battle away from Woodsman II promotion. We found a sheep resource just outside German borders, for what that's worth. This unit will have to heal up again.

The other axe was waiting outside CivPlayers borders while we were talking to them in the hopes of giving us a little extra leverage in NAP discussions. I would have moved the unit at the end of last turn, only all of the other teams finished their turn 8 hours before the deadline for the first time in the last 60 days. Needless to say, I was not expecting that to happen and the unit sat unmoved for one turn. With our Woodsman axe having to heal for the immediate future, we now need to clear out the fogged region below the line of peaks and see about a land connection to Brick By Brick. I moved north this turn, to be followed by northeast moves the next couple of turns. We'll have to move another unit into CivPlayers territory if/when they sign Open Borders with us.

Our two axes in the southwest are both at about 4.5 health, and are resting this turn to heal up to full.



We have incoming barb units in the southeast, a warrior and an axe. We really need a war chariot over here to help clear this region out. I'm hesitant to move our only axe in the region too far outside our borders, since we have nothing for back up beyond a warrior (which would die horribly against the barb axe).

The worker micro plan calls for the new worker, Worker O, to move to the tile NW of the corn this turn in preparation for roading towards the oasis. Unfortunately we don't have a unit in place to defend that worker - I didn't read far enough ahead in the micro plan to have a defending unit in place. (Sorry about that, unfortunately I do miss things sometimes.) Our axe and warrior inside Focal Point were both there at the start of the turn. We could move Worker O blindly into the fog if we feel like taking a chance, but it will die if there's a barb unit on the corn tile. That feels like a foolish risk to me. I'm of a mind to put a turn into the grassland cottage north of Focal Point this turn, then just move BOTH workers in this area onto the forest NW of corn next turn. Yes, it's wasting a worker turn, but that way our roading plans won't be disrupted. How does that sound? Worker O is still unmoved on this current turn.

Overview and tile micro:

Relatively few changes here from last turn. Gourmet Menu grew to size 8 (the current happy cap there with no religion) and took the iron from Horse Feathers, which works two coastal tiles this turn to accelerate growth. Tree Huggers was the other city that grew, now up to size 6 working three non-river grassland cottages. Forbidden Fruit is preserving very sizable whip overflow into something else, either a war chariot or another worker, depending on what the team decides. It's working the new floodplains cottage so that it will regrow to size 4 faster.

The other story is that both Tree Huggers and Gourmet Menu have swapped to settlers, with the intention of triple whipping both next turn. Adventure One will also grow to size 10 next turn (where it's unhappy) and then double-whip a worker sitting in its queue. We know that one settler is going to the pink oasis spot on the CFC border. The other settler's location is still up in the air, and we really need to decide where it's going on this turn to continue planning moving forward. We probably need a revised micro plan, since the one I've been working with still has us single-revolting to Organized Religion in three more turns, when I think we've agreed that we want to wait for Monarchy and Hereditary Rule.

I would still prefer that we settle something to the area west of Seven Tribes, but if we don't, then we need to select another spot. The location NW-NW of the silks is probably out until our next phase of expansion because we need Tree Huggers to pop borders (still 9t) before that city can work the rice and be useful. The spot northeast of Forbidden Fruit could be an option, although I'd like to have another half-dozen turns to improve the two cities we already have there. Where else would we potentially settle? One of the southern locations? The wheat spot east of Seven Tribes that overlaps with that last unused floodplains? Whatever we decide, we need to have a clear plan in mind that answers:

1) Whether we are going to settle something west of Seven Tribes
2) If not, where is this settler in Gourmet Menu going?

A new plan that ties all this together would help a lot. I'll be happy to help work on that as needed.



Our GNP in the Demos category is rather silly this turn thanks to the addition of Currency trade routes in every city and the 40% bonus from Masonry pre-requisites. We even get another tiny boost from "known civ" bonus, since one of the other teams we've met already has Masonry tech, almost certainly CFC because of their Monotheism/Judaism. At 100% rate, we were at something like 250 GNP or whatnot. Silliness.

We also still have a diplomatic message from WPC that we need to respond to, so lots of work to be done. Let's see what we can come up with.

[Sullla]

Turn 94 - 525BC

This is the second half and conclusion of Turn 94.

I mostly relied on the previous SevenSpirits plan linked here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...kdWc#gid=0 However, I did have to make some alterations in one or two places based on more information. I'll go through and explain my choices.



The orders for Worker J here had the unit moving onto the tile north of the corn and cottaging it for the next four turns. However, we had largely agreed that we wanted to farm that tile and use it to chain irrigation to the rice tile in the northwest, so I sent our worker to the tile to the east instead as shown. This made more sense in light of our earlier planning in this region; if for some reason we change our minds, we can always cancel this order.



In the southwest, we didn't have any real plan for Workers B and D. They were going to road towards the wines spot, only now we've been forced to settle elsewhere by the presence of CivPlayers. They started the turn on the plains tile northwest of the wheat (the tile with the sign) and their orders were to go north and road. But again, if we aren't settling to the west that tile doesn't do much for us, and I didn't see it setting up these workers well for the next turn after that.

Instead, I moved them northeast (onto the tile northwest of Seven Tribes) and roaded that tile. From here, the workers can go in quite a few directions: they can move to the plains river tile southeast of Gourmet Menu and finish that cottage, they can move to any of the forest tiles at Seven Tribes to chop, or they could even move onto either of the plains hill tiles to the south if for some reason we would want to mine them. I see this as giving us much more versatility to send these workers wherever they are needed. Still have no idea just what that will be, I'm looking forward to seeing what kjn and Seven come up with.



Here is the situation at Focal Point. I have our two workers on the tile south of the peak, prepared to road that forest next turn. Our warrior is providing symbolic coverage for now. Our axeman sits on the pigs tile playing zone defense, ready to cover the workers next turn or prepare to defend the city. We'll see where that barb axe decides to move. Adventure One should be able to overflow into a war chariot and complete it next turn, which I think we'll want to do.

The warrior who was providing military police in Gourmet Menu is now free to move back to Horse Feathers after that city's settler whip. He'll get there just in time as it grows into unhappiness next turn. Note also the CFC chariot, which I don't believe ever spotted our worker roading party. I waited for it to move first this turn just to be sure. Wonder what they are thinking as they move through all our empty core cities.



At Forbidden Fruit, we had a lot of suggestions to dump the worker whip overflow into a war chariot, a move that I agree with. We can finish the chariot this turn if we work the forested plains hill, although that hardly seems worthwhile to me. In a true emergency, yes of course, but I don't think we need to do that. I would much rather work the corn and bananas, the two best tiles available, and stock up some food for a very rapid period of growth (currently +9 food). That corn will be going back to Mansa's Muse very shortly, so this is about as good as it will get for Forbidden Fruit. Thoughts? Still time to swap the bananas for another tile if we feel like we need the chariot ASAP.

Overview and tile micro:

This was the turn of great dying as we whipped three times for a total loss of 8 population (3 + 3 + 2). Even our civ can't whip away that much population without having an effect. Nonetheless, it's all going to good causes, in the form of a worker and two settlers. We will actually be up to 16 workers next turn (!!!) It's good to be Expansive sometimes. The two settlers will go to found cities #11 and #12, which should both be up on Turn 98. I can't wait to do the Turn 100 overview given our extreme pace.

The whips did cause some tile reconfigurement. Adventure One gave up both corn and deer, now sitting at the happy cap of size 8 until we can hook up wines and swap to Hereditary Rule civic. It's working 8 cottages for the moment. Those tiles went to Horse Feathers (now on a major growth cycle of its own as it powers towards Moai) and Mansa's Muse, which will take the deer and corn to finally regrow as it builds Great Wall. Failgold or completion are both good outcomes for us there. Gourmet Menu gives up two floodplains to Seven Tribes in a bizarre tile shuffling dance down in the south. We could use a religious spread into the capital or Gourmet Menu really badly right now for happiness purposes; I suspect we'll get right on that as soon as we're in Organized Religion civic.

One note with regard to Brick By Brick: I suggest that we move one of our workers there onto the forested plains hill tile and start roading next turn. That will open up a trade route to CivPlayers, which is worth about 7 commerce/turn right now. It's not even wasted labor either, as we'll be able to return on the road and chop that forest into something useful later.

We can research Monotheism tech in 2t at 50% break-even rate or the min/max approach using 0% this turn and 100% next turn. The team seems to prefer the latter and I don't particularly care one way or the other. Just remember that lots of people were all over my team in Pitboss #2 for not "hiding" our GNP better. I think that running steady-state break even rate does less to freak people out as opposed to the giant jumps on the graph, but as I said, I leave this decision to others.



Demos took a large hit in the Food department from those whips. Still in first though and we'll grow back 2 pop immediately next turn. It will get better. We just miss the #1 mark in GNP at 0% science, we have a fairly large lead in GNP at 50% break-even rate, and we are stupidly far in front at 100% rate. Everything else looks much the same as before.

Hope that works for everyone, looking forward to seeing our upcoming micro stuff planned out in more detail. I'll work on that over the weekend as well if we haven't already hammered everything out by then.

[Sullla]

Turn 95 - 500BC

We're mostly done with this turn, just a couple more things to finish up before we end our turn. I'm working from Seven's latest micro plan here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...kdWc#gid=1 Right now it's still a work in progress, and there are some some incorrect elements left over from the previous plan. I'm going to outline here what exactly still needs discussion and input for this current turn. Off we go.



Moving northeast-northeast with the CFC scout found the newest Spanish Apolyton city. It was working an unimproved grassland forest at the start of the turn, and has since swapped to something else. Not much of interest for our team. I guess it's useful to spot the sugar resource; it looks like all of the Calendar resources are distributed throughout the equatorial jungle region of this map. This unit will go northeast again next turn unless we would spot a barb unit. Cross your fingers for no barbs.



Here's the situation in the northwest. We did not find anything by moving the scouting axe this turn. He'll go east next turn and continue defogging that peaks region.

The biggest news here was a free spread of Hinduism to Brick By Brick, which speeds up the border pop by quite a bit. It's now due in 3t instead of 6t, plus we'll be able to use the Organized Religion bonus here shortly to chop out a library and (hopefully) control the third-ring 100 culture borders. That would make us a lot safer. The two workers have split, one on the forested plains hill and one onto the plains tile SW of the city. I covered the latter one with an axe just to keep CivPlayers honest. We should have a trade route to their team in 2t, and then we'll be off to improve the wheat and wines. Probably the wines first, as Brick By Brick is kind of a resource dump city, and the empire-wide benefits of the wines are more important.

Not picture to the east: there's a barb warrior about to move onto the gems tile at Tree Huggers, but the city will complete an axe next turn and kill it easily. Nice timing there.



This is the southern region where the barb axe has been troubling us. We chose to produce a war chariot out of Forbidden Fruit last turn, and that will make this little conundrum much easier to handle. I moved the chariot onto the pigs tile, where it should be able to kill the axe next turn. I expect the axe to move onto our copper, where we get 99% odds; even if it moves north and stays on the forest, we will get about 90% odds, plus have an axe on hand to clean up if we would somehow lose. It should die and make things a lot easier here. (Now that I look at this, the axe should be a tile southeast on the road, so that our axe can cover the workers next turn if needed. I'll make that change later.)

On the left side of this screen, I have worker H selected. This guy still has not moved yet; his orders as written must be a copy-paste mistake or something, as they no longer make sense. (As written he was supposed to be cottaging a plains hill, which is impossible! Heh.) I've left the worker unmoved for now. My thought is to spend this turn in transit, moving to the tile E-E of the capital where the CFC chariot is sitting right now. The worker can then either finish the grassland cottage north of Focal Point (which would be useful immediately), or go chop forests near Focal Point for Mausoleum purposes, or go help cut down the jungles in the northeast. Any of them would be good choices. Let me know what everyone thinks here.

The settler in Gourmet Menu has also been left unmoved for now. I'm 99% sure that we want to move this guy to the tile SE of the capital this turn en route to the southern oasis or the northeast jungle, but we don't have directions for the settler written in the plan as yet. (The old orders heading to the west are still in there.) Just want to get the all-clear OK before moving.



Here is the northeast jungle frontier. We finished a road this turn on the jungle spice tile N-NE of Forbidden Fruit, and pushed a worker on to the next tile beyond it, covered by our axe. Swapping to the cultural overlay reveals no new WPC borders up here for the moment, which means we appear to be clear to found our next city. That said, we've never official nailed down the spot for this city. Red and blue appear to be the two options, with red being a better city and blue claiming dyes for our team. I'm going to suggest rather strongly that the red spot is better for the following reasons:

1) Double food bonus (duh)
2) Can borrow the 3/0/5 grassland spice tile from FF while waiting on border pop (blue is terrible pre-cultural expansion)
3) Has a forest in first-ring for insta-chop granary

I'm not worried about losing out on the dyes because we can plant another city on the tile north of the gems to claim dry rice + dyes. Maybe there's an even better spot that we can't see at present in the fog, but that spot itself should be nice and safe. (WPC is unlikely to be pushing cities into the jungle any time soon, given their war and the fact that they told us they are beelining Construction, not Iron Working.) This seems pretty straightforward, just want to check with everyone first.

As mentioned last turn, I do not want to push the Eastern Dealers axe another tile north to scout. We're very thin on units in this area for the moment, until a war chariot can get up here from our core. If the ED axe goes north, we can't stop the pigs from getting pillaged by a barb walking out of the fog. We'll simply have to wait and explore that tantalizing gems/rice/dyes area in a few more turns.

Overview / tile micro:

The cities are nearly all configured as written in the micro plan. The exception is at the capital and Horse Feathers. The plan I have linked at the top of this post has Adventure One taking the corn back this turn from HF. However, the capital is currently at the happy cap, and using the corn just causes it to grow into unhappiness. Horse Feathers can grow to size 8 before hitting the happy cap, and actually should be able to reach size 9 because its whipping penalty wears off in 3t. Feels like we'd rather have the corn going to that city to me. I've drawn in the tiles above as they are currently configured, and will be happy to change if I've missed something.

Elsewhere, the price for getting the war chariot out from Forbidden Fruit last turn is that it takes another turn to grow to size 4. I agree with the rest of the team that this was still a good trade (darned barb axe!) So far, we still have not lost a unit since that initial starting warrior, and only had the one cottage tile pillaged all game, while killing about 30 total barb units. Most cities are growing back quickly in the wake of last turn's whipping spree. Gourmet Menu is sitting on 14 shields of overflow by building Wealth; I have no idea what that's going into just yet, but I'm sure there's a plan there. Seven Tribes is actually only 9t away from completing Hanging Gardens, and I like our chances to land that one with our stone resource. We're also taking a shot at Great Wall in Mansa's Muse, where getting the wonder would be nice and failgold (with stone bonus) is nearly as useful.

A word about research: there was some discussion on whether to research Monotheism tech this turn or run 0% gold for another turn. I believe that we should finish Monotheism this turn (at 80% rate) for tile micro purposes: next turn, we'll be giving the gold tile to FF and MM will take back the corn to start growing. Since MM has a library and FF does not, we'll get more beakers by researching this turn while MM has the gold tile, and then running all gold next turn when FF has it. After taking this screenshot, I went ahead and set us to 80% research in-game, whch will finish Monotheism tech. We should be in good shape to finish Monarchy at eot 99 and then double-revolt to HR/OR on Turn 100.



Demos continue to be very flattering at 0% science. We're at 190 something when we run 80% research, and it will just be stupid when we go for Monarchy tech with 40% pre-requisite bonus and the known civ tech bonus from CFC and CivPlayers already having the tech. Our Food lead has shrunk over the past few turns, which is what you'd expect in the wake of whipping 8 pop last turn. Soldier count is rising as we complete more war chariots. Amusingly enough, we are first in Approval Rate despite whipping more heavily than anyone in the game. I know how that stat is calculated, it just always amuses me to see that.

Anyway, we are about 90% done for this turn as I said. We should be able to go over the last few tidbits and then be finished.

[Sullla]

Turn 96 - 475BC

The turns are coming around at a very nice pace these days, 36-48 hours each. Feels just about right. I can't stress how much better the flow is compared to those 3-4 day turns from before.



We've found a banana resource in the extreme east as our scout continues pushing northwards. I'm going to keep hugging the coast of that lake as the scout moves forward, since it cuts down on the potential number of tiles where we can run into a barb. For example, only two tiles could be deadly when we move north next turn. Keep the fingers crossed. It will take a few more turns to pass through the jungle belt to the other side.



Well, well, well. Look what we have here. Veeeeeery interesting.

This is probably the biggest news from this turn, as we found ivory up in the far northwest. Keep in mind that we are not playing under RB rules, and war elephants are very much in play for this game. Unfortunately the spot is not very convenient for our team, way up there in that jungle/peaks region. Hopefully CivPlayers has not scouted this region yet, since they can very easily plant a city two tiles east of the gems and have a cows/gems/ivory spot. Now before we take any drastic actions, we need to scout out the remaining fogged tiles in this area, which we can clear over the next two turns. I'm praying that there will be a food resource of some kind and that we can run of our next settlers up there, possibly by boat, to go claim that resource. But for the moment, we have to wait and see what our axe reveals in the area.

In the Brick By Brick area, we have a worker roading on the plains hill tile two tiles west of the city, and another worker moved onto the forest two tiles south. I had to cover that southern worker with our axe to keep CivPlayers honest. That means that the northern worker is uncovered, but he should be fine. We would have seen a barb unit incoming from the northwest, and CivPlayer shouldn't even have vision on that tile (the row of forests on the tiles between us should block vision). In any case, we'll finish the road to them next turn for a trade route, and BBB will expand borders in two more turns to make things a lot safer. (The CivPlayers warrior in the south has already moved this turn.)



A barb warrior moved onto our gems at Tree Huggers, and I decided to kill it with our spear instead of our axe. We had the choice of 3 XP on the spear at 99% odds, or 1 XP on the axe at 100% odds. Not a hard choice which one was better.

In terms of shuffling our units around, I would suggest keeping the new axe at Tree Huggers and moving our spear over to Brick By Brick. I'd feel a lot safer with an axe and spear there compared to just axes. Alternately we could send the spear to provide military police for an inner core city like Mansa's Muse where it's unlikely to see combat. The axe coming out of Adventure One will be sent over to Forbidden Fruit, as the axe in there has moved to go defend our new jungle city in the northeast. Mansa has no defender at the moment, although that's probably fine since it's so deep in our territory and has no happiness issues.



Here's the south of our territory. The barb axe suicided against our own 4 XP axe defending on the forest between turns, taking it to a fifth experience point and a second promotion. I've moved the axe into Focal Point to heal faster, and I'll probably promote the axe to Shock next turn since that will allow it to heal a turn quicker. With us already having Combat I, we almost certainly want Shock as the next choice. The workers roaded another tile towards the oasis spot, covered by a warrior and our war chariot war scooter. (I moved the warrior first to see if there were any barbs in the area, and only then moved the rest of the units.) Long term, the plan is to swap the warrior and the axe in this region, with the warrior sitting in Focal Point for HR happiness and the axe protecting the front lines at the pink oasis city. We'll make that change in a couple of turns once the city is down and the axe has recovered. The settler for this spot is sitting inside Focal Point and will plant our city on T98.

The other war chariot out of Adventure One has moved to the southwest to go do some scouting. We'll move this unit onto the forest SW of the cows next turn, and then go poke around the southern wasteland to see if anything gets revealed. The war chariot will also be in range to protect our workers during the Hanging Gardens chopping operations at Seven Tribes.



Here's a picture of the northeast frontier. CFC founded their eighth city earlier this turn on the marked tile, in a location that claims horses and grassland cows, while also being able to share the copper resource at Daivagati. This is great news for us, as we knew that CFC had whipped a settler earlier and it makes it impossible for them to contest our oasis claim with their own settler. After we plant our city, I expect them to put their border city south or southeast of the rice tile, either of which we could live with. Remember that the Eastern Dealers lake is too small to build ships, there's no risk of invasion via boating.

Our settler in this area is sitting north of Forbidden Fruit. The axe is covering a worker roading to the spot; city will be founded on T98. The Eastern Dealers axe moved back into our territory this turn to save 1gpt on unit supply costs, after making sure that the worker could move safely onto the gems tile.

Overview / tile micro:

We're building Wealth all over the place to preserve overflow into a whole bunch of different stuff. This has the side of effect of also giving us just enough income to squeeze out Monarchy tech at eot 99 for a Turn 100 revolt. Tile micro from this turn is very similar to last turn, just swapped around the tiles around Mansa's Muse and Forbidden Fruit to set Mansa to growing again with deer + corn. I've also drawn in the future city locations in the north and south, upcoming in two more turns.

By the way, everyone needs to give major credit to kjn and SevenSpirits for doing the grunt work of planning. The micro at Seven Tribes over the next half-dozen turns is absolutely gorgeous, some of the prettiest managemet of chopping, whip overflow, and targeted food numbers for exact city growths that you'll ever see. This is the most tightly microed game that I've ever been a part of, and it's beautiful to watch play out in practice.

Notice how the tech bar at the top states that Monarchy will take 540 turns to research? That's the exact number of beakers that it costs, 540 beakers. This means that we finished Monotheism tech with 0 overflow whatsoever, an extremely rare occurance in Civ4. We have just enough beakers to complete Monarchy tech by running 0% / 100% / 80% research over the next three turns. It's a nice contrast to the 20 turns (!!!) that it took We Play Civ to research Mathematics tech. Note that we are also making 99 gold/turn at 0% research rate; we can see what other teams are making due to Currency tech, and CFC gets 55 gold/turn at their own 0% rate. They have nearly as much population as we do, but our economy is way more advanced.



Demos at 0% tech rate. Two teams have turned up research to full and sit above us in the GNP lead, although at our break-even rate we go up to 220 something and take back the top mark. The 100% rate next turn will be fun to watch. Our Food is regrowing quickly as we recover from those whips, and we grow 4 more pop points next turn. We've also slipped back into 3rd in Power, below the German team (who is #1) and I think WPC at second, not completely sure of that though. Still first in Land and Total Pop, although not in the game's geometric population stat. German team researched Sailing tech a little while back, and now has return trade routes with us, which is why our Exports number has dropped. We don't really care if they get income back from us though - we simply want to maximize our own trade routes.

I don't think there's anything else to do, but I wanted to allow some time for others to comment before ending turn. Any thoughts?