[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[spacetyrantxenu]

Nope, I made her wait before we left for dinner.

[scooter]

Turn 108

Let's do a larger update this morning. This is a big turn, because we definitely just circumnavigated.



Size 5 capital on T108? Ouch. Really curious why slowcheetah has had such a brutal game, but I suspect it has something to do with awful land. No fancy image editing from me, but that easternmost grassland tile translates to this column down south:



So yeah, we got it. Should fine out end of turn. Theoretically, it's possible someone else could do it this turn, and that would result in a coin flip, but... Well okay, we have met 13 out of a possible 17 players in this game. I went through our foreign relations screen, and Commodore has met more of those 13 than anyone else. He's met...



5. 4 of which are on our continent. So our odds are awfully good . Just a check in on the miserable trio and, welp:



I feel bad for WilliamLP and Bacchus. Kinda sucks when your neighbor decides to just play a troll game. Looks like he's razed a city off each of them and declared a few times. Bacchus and retep are at war right now despite not even touching borders, which, lol. Anyway, let's take a look around the empire. We have a trio of cities working on settlers since we're a bit behind on that front, and our economy can now easily support more cities. Let's go west to east.



Dumped a chop into a settler last turn, whipped this Spear to completion this turn. It'll dump 22 more hammers into the settler, so we'll be sitting at 63/100 while producing 11fhpt. The city north of here then should be settled T113 if I'm doing my mental math correctly.



So this'll finish EoT110, and will head out to our island spot in the east. More excitingly, our great scientist pops in 4T. Academy coming soon! After that lands, we'll probably retake the Wheat from Trailblazers and grow a few sizes here. I imagine after going up a couple sizes, we may stagnate and work some scientists for awhile because I don't think we want to build many more cottages here so there's not much point in building a cottage and we bulldoze it while it's a hamlet or something.



One of our weakest cities pre-CS is being useful. Next turn we overflow 27h into a settler and deposit 30h more via chop. It produces 8fhp, so it'll be a 6 turn build. Not bad. We could always choose to speed it via 1 pop whip since at size 1 it would regrow to size 2 pretty much instantly.



Here's our little island with a second work boat incoming for the second fish at Boilermakers. Pretty happy about how quickly we'll have Moai up and running there. Hooray for stone. Anyway, we're FINALLY going to have horse hooked pretty soon. Only took us 110 turns. Here's our southern half with resource bubbles off so you can see the detailed views:



Orioles culture pops at the end of this turn. Tigers is going to be a great commerce city in 70 turns or so. It would be even better if it weren't for the FIN river nerf, but oh well. Pindicator, at Orioles I decided now is as good a time as any to get rid of that jungle 1S of the lake. Chop/farm that too. We might be better off just outright farming rather than Chop/farming because then we get the jungle defense for the entire time. Not that I think it matters that much, just a stray thought. I made a diplo offer:



We have a bunch of excess happy. Right now we don't have any use for happy in return, so I'm trying to come up with some more creative ways to use our happy. MH was rejecting OB with us, so maybe this will be more worthwhile to him. I tacked on his world map for good measure. He already played this turn and rarely logs in more than once, so I figure he'll get this message after seeing we've already circumnavigated, so he won't mind the map throw-in. By the way, how do you want to go about map trading after circumnavigation? Do you want to just freely start swapping with people like crazy, or what are you thinking? I tend to think in this large of a game, if you trade with even 1-2 people, your map WILL get out, so you might as well trade with none or all. Kinda like how we got Nakor's PB8 map at the last minute via a trade with someone else.



Much more encouraging. Pretty recently we were 10th in both food and mfg, so things are definitely on the up-swing. That GNP is at 0% science too. It shoots up close to 200 if I turn science on, and that's before Academy.

So that's about it. Any questions or comments?

[pindicator]

I think we forgot about doing HBR after Currency. Scooter, I know the academy is coming up, but what do you think about turning on science for 2 turns to grab HBR here and start building some Horse Archers? I'm looking at Nakor's ever-rising power (and Lewwyn's recent spike) and I'd rather play it cautious with how good our position is.

I can swap this turn and it's a 2-turn tech at 100%

[NobleHelium]

mh isn't likely to check the event log until after deciding on your trade, you know.

[pindicator]

Our boats are awesome

[scooter]

Michigan just had a 4th and 48.


B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G B1G.



--

Yay for fast boats!

[Zed-F]

What are you planning to do with your circumnavigating boats?

[pindicator]

Chip Kelly would have gone for it there.


We met Ichabod this turn!



He has 11 cities and gold and ivory. It seems like everybody has gold and ivory this game. I offered to swap maps with Ichabod. In fact, I offered to swap maps with everybody we haven't already swapped maps with: WilliamLP, Dhalphir, Bacchus, suttree, and retep. If mostly_harmless turns down scooter's offer then we should swap with him next turn, and in a few turns we can trade maps with slowcheetah.

WilliamLP jumped in while I was playing and we did trade maps. Here's the 3rd continent. (I think there's a fourth in the south-center of the map.)







WilliamLP has some NICE land. Like super nice and a lot of it. I'm not sure what happened with retep over there, but he was one of the people who spent 2 turns moving his initial settler. I wonder if maybe he moved that settler away from where those clams are clustered? Anyway, they ended up with capitals just 7 tiles apart. No wonder there's been war.

Retep is very boxed in, and to be honest i think he makes a good zerker conquest target later on. Small, weak, good spot to gain a foothold, and the neighbor's cities aren't close enough to really swamp over his lands with their culture.

Ichabod has some nice land as well, and I bet he has some overseas cities as well. We met him by means of a workboat some 20 tiles southeast of his lands. I could see Ichabod and WilliamLP fighting for dominance over this continent. Betting on Ichabod for experience, but WilliamLP has some nice land so maybe that's premature...

As for slowcheetah, not sure why he's only at 5. He does have a lot worse land than his neighbors - not nearly as many food bonuses as WilliamLP - and what's worse is he let Ichabod sneak up and take the one good spot in "his" area. He's pretty much an also-ran at this point, unless something crazy happens. Although he does own the world's supply of silk

And boatastic boating begins!

[pindicator]

Traded maps with mh, and it looks like we found out why mackoti has a ton of land:



His settling order went:

1. Krillingen
2. Eridu
3. Kish
4. Lagash
5. Ur
6. Nibru

And that's why the south looks like this:

[scooter]

Those MH screenshots are just... breathtaking. I'm getting twitchy just looking at it.

Well, uh... the good news... is I guess mackoti will have to burn those all instead of capturing them in order to get a sane dotmap when he rolls MH with Knights?