Gillette Turn Discussion

[Old Harry]

Turn 173

I have us saving money on Sci Meth, as I thought knowing where our oil is would be more useful than anything Liberalism can give us - we're due a couple of great people before the communism spy, so we can perhaps bulb sci meth with a scientist or start the golden age early if we get other great people or Trolls get the great spy. It'll take about 12 turns to get sci meth at breakeven right now.

Right now Trolls are up:
Music, Nationalism, Liberalism, Banking, Economics and - I think - Corporation.
We don't have anything over them. They need Gunpowder, Replacable Parts and Rifling for rifles.

Our NAP with Trolls runs out t200, M3's NAP with Trolls runs out t210, our NAP with M3 runs out t190. Do we want to try the same as last time? Phoney war and be ready for any Troll attack on t200?

Anyhow Zak apologised for the scouting thing and offered Marble for Rice, I declined, but if they are keen on getting health resources they might trade for gold - I suggested 15 gpt for each to see what they would counter with.

On SFL we've got 10 out of 13 pop working improved tiles. The workers are spreading out quickly and I expect this to improve rapidly. Work boats are the only execption - Urumi, Xiphos, Yakuza and Arquebus will have at least 6 turns to wait to get their seafood hooked

The settlers for Blunderbuss and Carbine are in place, but I'm having second thoughts - should Blunderbuss go 1NE to avoid orphaning the fish? I won't settle them until we have to or the next golden age starts... There is also another settler 4S1E of Voulge who can settle for bananas and gems next turn. I think it will be worth settling this one as the maintenance on this side of the island is about 12 and the gems will pay that off very quickly. Any thoughts?

[YossarianLives]

Yeah, let's move blunderbuss. It would be a shame to orphan that coastal fish.

I doubt Trolls would fall for the same trick again. Also not sure M3 would be willing to play along a second time...

Since I haven't said it in a while, awesome job Old Harry! I remain extremely impressed by the great work your doing here. You too, Cheater Hater!

[Cheater Hater]

We should be monitoring the seas, ready to settle the coastal cities if we see any Trolls galleons (or any galleons, for that matter ). I'm assuming that's what our caravels are doing? How much of SFL coast actually needs to be settled at this point? If I remember correctly, we settled from the SW corner to about half of the east coast clockwise--maybe a bit past the corner?

I'm definitely in favor of settling the gems city (and renaming it appropriately), but only if we don't think we'll have to settle the coastal cities--remember, the cost shows up not just in the settled city, but also in the "number of cities" maintenance everywhere (unless I understand that mechanic horribly).

I also don't like the phony war 2 idea unless you want to be horrible and actually invade M3 this time :-/

I don't know how much of this is on me at this point--I still post now and then, but I haven't posted as much recently (mainly because things ran smoothly during the golden age, and then we had the semi-downtime), and I haven't checked in on the save in forever :-/

[Old Harry]

Turn 174

Our Caravels are strung out over the Troll coast - I'm not sure what the best layout is to keep coverage of their cities and make sure nothing slips through the gaps, but I'll make up an image next turn (when I'm home). Trolls do have a settler built in White Russian, I presume for their silver/deer island. No sign of any galleons yet though.

Settled the gems city south of Voulge (confusingly now named Blunderbuss) at a cost of 10 gpt. Once its working the gems and a cottage it'll pay that back easily.

I agree about trying the phoney war again - we actually want Trolls to think we're ready for them t200 and not attack - its going to take us a while to catch them up after we get communism.

Thanks for the kind words guys, you can stop by any time! Seriously the reporting helps me catch a bunch of mistakes, while you guys do a pretty good job of spotting the ones I miss... Obviously any that we collectively pass up are all Trolls fault

Hopefully normal reporting service will be resumed next turn.

[Cheater Hater]

Next turn under which turn pace--the "holy crap we're doing one turn a day" pace or the "sunrise's server got hit by a meteor" pace?

In all seriousness, make sure to do a summary post of everything we missed if you have the time

Everyone has a silver-deer island? Was the one we settled by SFL ours, or someone elses?

Random thought: does the mainland+SFL+the various islands account for all the land more or less, or is there another SFL continent (or more likely, a large island) still out there?

[Old Harry]

I'm back - was that quick enough? It sounds like I owe you a State of the World post, so here goes...

First up Pirates offer us 200 gold for our map which I accepted. Haven't heard back from M3 or Trolls yet, but TEAM aren't interested in giving us any money.


This is our mainland.


This is the north of SFL - you can see that Trolls have two silver-deer islands near their territory - we've claimed the northern one, but I think we felt the southern one was just too far away for us to settle...


The South of SFL. We have settlers in place in case anyone tries to nab our land. I just had an idea - should we offer to transport a settler to the tundra islands off their coast for M3 and Pirates? Could we settle the city then gift it? Although they can't have trade routes with it until Astro can they? So they might not be so interested.


This is the Troll core, as you can see the caravels have been sneaking in to check up on what units are in coastal cities and making sure they end turn back in international waters.


This is the TEAM core - it probably doesn't show just how much territory Trolls took...


M3's land looks like it pushes into Pirate teritory.


While I think Pirates have pushed towards TEAM.


Zooming in a little it looks like Trolls have built their first galleon, and I'd guess are aiming for the tundra island to the south of us. For some reason they didn't upgrade one of the galleys we gave them (which would have been a 5-mover). This island isn't one of the ones I thought of as being "theirs" - I wonder if they want to get all three? Or are they planning to grab the patch of land to the east of SFL that we haven't bothered with yet? Anyway Plako logged in while I was taking screenshots and moved the galleon out of my sight, so I guess he'll


Moving into economy mode - on SFL I've been building Granaries first (followed by a couple of work boats too), but then should we go for forges or courthouses next? You can see how crazy the maintenance is for Trident. If we go forge first it saves 22 hammers on the courthouse whip, if we go courthouse first it saves 10 gold every turn before we whip the forge. To re-grow the pop to 3- or 4-pop whip in Trident will only take 4 or 5 turns, so thats 22 hammers vs 45 gold. I'm inclined to whip the courthouse first...


Even after we have State Property the courthouse will still save us 3pt, but it may be what allows us to get to SP in time to still be relevant. On the near side of the island (Voulge and Woldo) the courthouse will only save 7 and 6 gpt, and they don't make food as fast, so perhaps the forge first might be better over here. Any thoughts?


Hopefully that covered what you wanted to know?

[Cheater Hater]

Things look good--thanks for the state of the world post

We have more SFL coast coverage than I thought--the only problem is that if we do have to emergency-settle Carbine and Desert Eagle, we won't have full coastal coverage, so we'd probably have to let a Trolls settler or two destined for the mainland. On a related note, could we spare two of our missionaries to wait at Carbine and Desert Eagle so we could spread right when we settle those two cities? Don't forget we're in OR, so we can build them anywhere, even on SFL (if there's religion anywhere there--I think you mentioned there was a random spread somewhere on SFL a couple turns ago?

Watch for an out-of-the-way path by that galleon to SFL, though I'm assuming they'll go to their tundra island first (and I have no problem with them getting that)--they presumably have taken a bit of a financial hit absorbing TEAM's lands.

Yeah, we need to get to Communism first before we worry about what to do post-Communism--as a curiousity, how long would it take to get to Communism going straight there at the current break-even rate? (not counting stuff like our cities growing, or all the upcoming universities)

[Old Harry]

We have more SFL coast coverage than I thought--the only problem is that if we do have to emergency-settle Carbine and Desert Eagle, we won't have full coastal coverage, so we'd probably have to let a Trolls settler or two destined for the mainland. On a related note, could we spare two of our missionaries to wait at Carbine and Desert Eagle so we could spread right when we settle those two cities? Don't forget we're in OR, so we can build them anywhere, even on SFL (if there's religion anywhere there--I think you mentioned there was a random spread somewhere on SFL a couple turns ago?

They can fit a few onto the edges of the continent too, but yeah, if we had another settler over there we couldn't block the route to the interior there will be a little corridor between Carbine and Desert Eagle before the borders pop:


Actually it's probably also worth trying to get Buddhism into all the SFL cities before those courthouse and forge whips just for the hammer bonus. I have Foil and Katana building missionaries for a couple of mainland cities, but they can make some more to boat over too.

Yeah, we need to get to Communism first before we worry about what to do post-Communism--as a curiousity, how long would it take to get to Communism going straight there at the current break-even rate? (not counting stuff like our cities growing, or all the upcoming universities)

Right now we have 2600 gold, we produce 1000 beakers and use 600 gold at 100%

All three techs have a 20% bonus for pre-req techs, so that's 1200 beakers per turn.

9400/1200 = 7.8 turns

However the 2600 gold we have will only power tech for 4.3 turns, so after that we have to go to break even - 30% - producing 330 beakers per turn. So at that point we are half way to our 9400 beakers and the remaining 4600 beakers will take about 14 turns more. So that gets us there in 18 turns - t193.

If we complete our universities next turn our base beakers should go up about 10% ish so lets say 1300 beakers per turn for four turns leaves us 4200 to get then our 330 beakers per turn get us there in 13+4=17 turns - t192.

We plan to get a great scientist from ITS about t180 - this should get us 2000 beakers towards scientific method, meaning we only need 7400 beakers and the break-even research should only take 7 turns - t187.

So what I'm saying is that t185 is the quickest we can hope to get there, t195 is the slowest.

On the great people front we could get a 75% scientist from ITS t180 and a 75% scientist from Foil t189, or by delaying ITS we could get an 80% scientist from Foil t182, then a 75% scientist from ITS t184. I think this latter version works better for us, even though it means the next great person from ITS will be delayed by four turns, but that Foil can get back to producing units on t182.

[Cheater Hater]

Wow, that's a lot faster to Communism than I thought--I assumed there was no way we'd get there before the NAP expired; instead we could certainly get Gunpowder before then (and maybe Nationalism?) to have at least some defenses

[Old Harry]

Turn 175

As expected Trolls have a galleon en-route to the silver-deer island. Or perhaps to the bananna peninsula on SFL that we haven't settled yet...


Our university builds were supposed to complete this turn, but Pike and Longsword have let us down. Next turn we'll whip three of Gladius, longsword, machette and pike so Occam can start on oxford. BOG and Dirk will start on grocers and other commerce buildings.


I really wonder where this Troll power is going...


And we aren't catching up like I'd hoped...