RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[SleepingMoogle]

You do have a point there Mania. My experience in MP is very limited, so maybe I am thinking too much from a SP point of view. Settling on the jungle hill tile is fine with me if both Bob and you favor it.

That also means we can make some alterations in the worker and scouting plan. Anoleis needs to switch road-building effort towards the SW, and we can alter Jenkin's scouting since it won't take him out of the borders for a while. I would propose going east to defog the tiles there, and then turn around to cover Anoleis for the tiles outside of the border. After that he can defog towards the NW.

[SleepingMoogle]

Here's an alternate scouting path, which should reveal everything we want to see in the south:

[ManiaMuse]

Let's just hope a bear doesn't pop out and eat Jenkins when we're on that FP tile...

[SleepingMoogle]

Such are the dangers of scouting.. :-)

It might be possible that Jenkins has time to heal up this time. I'll have to recheck that later on.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah I would prefer the jungle hill for the advantages Mania and I have already discussed here. While we want to have at least one ring of cities around the capital, I think that the south is going to be our major focus for the time being; as Moogle pointed out, we really will need to get those flood plains into play to balance out expansion and speed our teching. I figure 2nd city gets the horses, 3rd is commerce in the south, 4th is dependant on bronze but should probably be production (possibly the NW location), and then 5th may be a land grab to get as many fp possible in the south. Priority scouting directions I'd say are South and West, because we've seen FP in both directions.

Given the amount of FP and desert, I wouldn't be surprised if we were on some sort of heavily edited Oasis script, edited because that map type has very little water and I think we voted for at least some galley action on this map. Oasis also does have northern grassland silver, although I still think it's entirely artificial in this case.

[SleepingMoogle]

Alrighty then. Jungle hill will be our second city site. Here's thinking Feros might be a suitable name, as its namesake is quite dusty as well. Anyway, this probably changes our build plan as follows:

*The road on the Rice doesn't need to be finished for now, as we don't need the health right away.
*Similarly, we don't need to take Anoleis out of our borders, as there's we want to build the road towards the SW instead of the South. This also clears up Jenkins to properly scout the south.
*The two turns this gains can be used to road the tile west of the rice. After this we can mine the hill tile as in the original plan.
*Once the mine is finished, we move Anoleis out of our borders to construct a road to link the two cities. Right now the best way to do this looks to be to place a road on the Plains tile 2W of the rice, and on the grassland tile SW of that.

With this plan, Anoleis will leave our borders on T35. This means Jenkins has just enough time to reach that tile if we follow the scouting path I proposed earlier. Unless we run into more barb animals, I suggest we do this. Even if we do, we can send Jenkins to the capital and heal there while Fredriks protects the worker on the way south.

Due to the distance and the hill tile, the settler will need two turns to reach the planned location. This means our second city is founded on T40 instead of T39. If all goes well, we should have the Horses connected around T45, right around the time we finish our second Worker at the Citadel.

Feros should probably start with a Monument to get the borders expanding asap. In the meantime, the Citadel an build a Chariot while growing to size 4.

At some point we will want to revolt to Slavery. It may be best to do this once the Second worker is finished (ie, as soon as we finish researching BW) because the longer we wait with it, the more resources we lose.

We also need to decide what we want to do once we can chop forests. Do we wish to quickly chop our another Worker and Settler? Maybe we can slave a chariot?

Also a slight possibility; if we went for early Masonry to hook up the Stone and Stonehenge isn't completed yet, perhaps we can take a stab at it?

[SleepingMoogle]

The turn just rolled over, and since we're still in the running to finish that 'never finished turn last' trophy, I played the turn.

Jenkins moved onto the Jungle Rice tile. We'll have to decide what to do scouting-wise next turn as that we go either NW or SW. So far no sign of barb animals or other teams in any case.

Most teams had their score increase either last turn or this one. I think it is the land tiles from the capital border expansions that were added, but I'm starting to lose track of this. I keep having the bright idea of trying to match score increases to techs or builds, but never get around to it.

Anyway, we will finish the pasture next turn. Once that happens the added commerce from the sheep should knock a turn off the mining research. We'll have just enough time to road the tile to the SW at that point before moving to the grassland river hill and mine it.

[Bobchillingworth]

Nice worker plan, you may want to update the front page if you haven't done so already.

Regarding what to do in the capital after the 2nd worker, a lot of it is situational. I think we're probably going for pottery after BW now that we know we can have chariots for defense, so we may want to whip a single chariot and then go into a settler which we'll chop and then send south. I don't care so much what in particular we build, since workers, settlers, and military will all be necessities, but there should be an emphasis on getting rid of the bordering forests at the capital ASAP.

Question: if we start scouting with one of our first chariots, there may be a good chance of finding a civ with a capitol that only has a 1 or 2 warrior garrison. If we do find another civ early on, should we manuever around to try to get visibility on the city to decide if we want to attempt an attack, even though attempting visiblity in that manner would be an aggressive / hostile action? Under what circumstances, if any, should we consider a chariot rush? I'm inclined against one, on the grounds that we have some very attactive land that we need be settling, instead of throwing production into an offensive army, but depending on who we meet, how close they are, and what their defenses are it could be a very attractive prospect...

[ManiaMuse]

Cool, nice thoughts. I haven't got time to write a proper response now but just responding to a couple of questions.

Stonehenge would be absolutely awesome if it still is around. I seriously doubt it though with 16 civs around but if it does get to turn 40 or whatever and it still hasn't gone could be worth a pop. With only 2 industrious civs and 2 charismatic civs I suspect the other 12 probably won't bother trying at all so we might have a slightly greater chance. Masonry is probably too much of a diversion to get the stone hooked up in time though.

Also I'd rather build or chop chariots instead of slaving them, I think slaving should be reserved for key buildings and units that are likely to see combat rather than scouting units. With charismatic we should try to exploit our higher happy cap as much as possible and get the capital grown as quickly as possible. Also I think by the time we might discover a rival capital with a chariot it is unlikely that the capital will be undefended, we've probably missed the boat there. Even against a warrior a single chariot is still dicey odds if fortified in a city with cultural defence.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 27:

Our Worker Anoleis finished Pasturing the Sheep this turn. The added commerce did indeed drop down Mining research a turn, so it will finish on T31. Anoleis should spend the next two turns building a road on the Plains tile southwest of the Sheep. This will allow him to move onto the grassland river hill on T30 and start mining it as soon as the research finishes.

As I didn't see any objections to the proposed scouting path adjustments, I moved Jenkins SE onto the floodplain. Fortunately there's no barb units in sight, and he will move onto the Forest tile to the southeast:



The south keeps revealing floodplains underneath the fog. We may end up having to place two cities down here to access them all. Putting a city further south than the current proposed tile would probably be too great a distance to keep safe easily.

The Citadel will grow to size 3 next turn. At that point, the plan is to switch production to a Settler. Given that we now know about the presence of horses, do we wish to keep it that way or finish the current Warrior first? Production will be at 8 out of 15 hammers next turn.

A couple of teams increased in score again. I'll stop mentioning this now, since we aren't really doing anything with that info. Either way, nothing else happened; no contact with other Civs, no barb animals, and no events.

I'll work a bit on the adapted turn plan in the next post.