Actually, I am beginning to think that barteq's power spike is tech - probably iron working and archery. His score went up 13 points a four turns ago (a tech and a pop) and 9 2 turns ago (probably a tech and 2 pop points), which could easily be IW (or math) and archery. That fits, certainly a lot better than a short stack of WII jaguars coming to mess up my day.
Turn 50, In Which AT Finds His Northern Borders And Recaps The First 50 Turns - Yes, This Is The Update You Want To Read, With Pics Galore!
In the beginning The MapMakers created the water and the earth. Now the world was formless and empty (but toroidal), darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of Krill's Mod was hovering over the waters.
And the MapMakers said, “Let there be starts,” and there were starts. The MapMakers saw that the starts were good, and they separated the starts from one another. The MapMakers called the starts “balanced,” and the rest of the map they called “contested land.” And there was the first map.
And the MapMakers doled out leaders & civs and the players chose. And the MapMakers assigned the players to starts. And there was the second map. And perhaps there were many iterations of the map, for the MapMakers had many lurkers looking at the map and putting in their 2 cents, which was probably not annoying at all. And there was the final map.
And the host hosted the game, and the players connected and they claimed their civs and played... for 2000 years they have played.
In that time, the mightly Ignoble Empire has grown, perhaps not as fast as one might expect, but still faster than many others. It's mighty scout has roamed the land, fighting off might animals with nary a scratch. Tribal huts have given the Ignoble's precious metals, knowledge of their surrounding and even helped train them in the ways of wood craft, allowing safer and faster travel for the scout.
The Ignobles have found 3 lands - the Celts, the Scorers and the Aztecs. A 4th is certainly near, as they have found the Ignobles. Rumors of a 5th, to the north, have recently trickled to the capitol.
The Ignobles have mastered technology and regularly dine on bread and pork, with silver covered ivory utenils.
3 cities have been founded and they near founding their 4th, which shall be guarded by the mighty 1st archers, deadliest defenders in the known universe.
First, the events of the turn:
A warrior defeated a barb! I missed showing that this might happen, but it was a pretty easy victory, south of the Cap. My warrior is 1.7/2.
Adrien planted a city and teleported me north. That barb apparently hit Ichabods scout and damaged it.
North is more interesting:
We found borders, and they are NOT light blue, thus NOT Ichabod. My guess is dtay or borsche.
I assume ichabod is to my north east - east of Purple and north of Molach.
State of the civ:
Graphs:
I feel ok about my place among my close opponents. I think that some of those will go up soon, cause I think I'm making a lot more settlers over the next 40 turns.
Overall demos seem ok, too.
Cities:
Current capitol, source of most units. Will build settlers/workers and at least one more workboat for the whales. Starting to clearcut the trees to power expansion.
Future capitol. Dunno when i'll move it. Worker->lib->worker/settler. Mainly workers, since there isn't much in the way of hammers for the imp bonus, nor trees for cutting. Just whipped a settler which settles next turn.
Newest city - am planning on putting SoZ here and heroic epic. Should build a significant portion of my future military.
As we can see, Ichabod met adrien, has not met barteq. All our opponents have 2 cities now - barteq and ichabod have no theme. Everyone is in slavery.
Tech pace has been strong - I'm missign mysticism, masonry and all the religious techs, as well as sailing. Tech path after math is mysticism->iron working-> sailing->alphabet->aesthetics->currency. Why that path? Cause I should be able to get to currency without a problem and I want SoZ.
Micro the next few turns gets a little complicated. The goal is to finish Math in 5 turns and then 1 turn mysticism in time for the chop in UT to be able to 1-turn a monument.
Where this gets complicated is that I changed my original micro plan, which had Huh? working the pig & silver after the whip to working the pig and wheat, which gets me to grow an extra turn earlier, which gets the worker out a turn earlier, but which messes up science overflow. It can be done, but it's a micro where if I make any mistakes, I'll end up 2 turning mysticism. Which I can deal with by putting a turn into a road for UT, but why bother with that? I've already screwed up the micro for Unboiled Egg, which was supposed to get the road built the turn before I settle, so I can start improving the rice the turn I do settle, but I had made that a grass tile in my sim, not a desert one, which takes an extra turn to road.
The way the micro goes is that I have to work all commerce tiles all the time, including the cottage, except one turn in UT where I have to work a FP and not the horse, because if I work the horse the entire time, I finish the granary too early.
Also, I have to turn down research to 90% right after i found Unboiled Egg - I don'[t have enough cash to do 100% research and if I wait and have to turn it down to 80% later, I can't get myst.
Turn 51, In Which.. Man, I'm Getting Tired Of Writing These Things, So I'll Just Wing It
First in my area to get to 4 cities - I think I'm 2nd or 3rd overall, but I haven't been paying close attention.
Unboiled Egg will be a unit pump. It's currently paying for itself and will get another commerce when I hook up the road, but it'll lose it when I get the rice hooked up, at least for a while. Plan is granary->baracks->units->settler at some point. It'll never be a great city, but it makes for a nice front line with Molach.
I might go monument instead of barracks, we'll see.
Speaking of Molach, I lost his graphs, so I have to put some points on him. He's someone I absolutely need to keep graphs on for now, because of our proximity. I don't think he's a terribly aggressive player - we'll see how he reacts to my plant.
Uncovering those tiles showed... another great city site that I want (and I expect I can get, if I push) 1W of the sheep is what I'm thinking - lots of grass, 2 food, horses, couple of hills.
To the north - this seems like a possible reasonable border with our northern neighbor. That should give me slightly more land between us than them with border cities on hills and at least slightly behind rivers. in the least, 1 movers have to go an extra turn to cross the river. Obviously, we'll see what else is there. Meet our opponents there next turn.
Demos are looking good - top 1/2 in everything, top 3 in population and food, top 10 in GNP is great considering there are 3 holy cities, 2 wonders and several creative civs, and I presume the top guy is teching writing with 2 or even 3 pre-reqs.
I'll post the plan for the next 10-15 turns in a little while. I think I get 2 or 3 cities out, a couple more archers, a few more workers and a library in Huh?
So, the first 30 turns saw us create 1 settler. The next 20 turns, we created 2 more. The next 10 turns, 2 more come out, and we'll continue to push out settlers at a fairly rapid rate.
This is a map of the short term plan. Red and Blue Squares are city city, yellow circles are chops (all math powered), the green circle is a cottage and the blue circle is a farm.
Right now, we have 4 cities and 3 workers. In ten turns, we'll have 6 cities and 6 workers, with another 2 granaries, 1 monument and will almost have a library - Plus math and mysticism, and nearly done with IW.
Turn 52:
Banana Friction finishes worker->settler. Worker roads the wheat. Another worker continues to mine the grass hill with a forest on it.
Huh? is building a worker.
The worker at Unboiled Egg moves to the rice and farms. The archer moves in.
Urination Time continues to build a granary. The worker there moves to the grass hill.
T53
Banana Friction switches to a warrior.
Urination Time switches from the horse to the floodplain. Worker starts chop
T54 BF grows to size 6. warrior->settler. Warrior stays put. Worker to the silver jungle.
Urination Time switches back to the horse
T55 Math->myst. Chops complete.
Huh? goes from worker->lib. Always work most food tiles - we'll grow 4 pop in 5 turns. Worker finishes road on pig, hooking up Unboiled Egg.
Worker to red square.
T56 Myst->IW. Research to 0.
BF Settler->settler. Settler moves to jungle.
UT: Worker on grass hill in Urination Time roads. granary->monument.
Huh>: worker cottages FP.
Worker on red square chops.
T57
UE: worker roads rice.
BF: Worker chops river forest in BF.
UT:monument->warrior
Settler to red square
T58
Red square chop finishes (9 hammers to BF). Settler settles
BF: 1 pop whip.
T59: research to 100% - IW in 7.
BF: settler->worker
Settler to grass hill.
T60: settle blue square. Work horse. Build WB.
BF: worker->settler. will work settler for a turn and then make an archer to grow back.
Turn 52, In Which AT Meets dtay And Rhyming Commences
Or not - it's too early in the morning to try to write this in meter...
The north is, in fact, dtay, who is the score leader and, I suspect, the actual leader.
dtay is Imp/Ind of Sumeria, which is a strong combination. He's leveraging that combination masterfully, having picked up Stonehenge and is one of the 3 or 4 civs with 4 cities at this point.
The demos has someone with 51 crop and someone with 26 hammers and one of those is dtay, I don't know which.
Sealing off the north is a bit of a priority for me - I doubt I can get further north than what I have laid out and I may put cities north before the filler city I was talking about. Vultures are good, but protective archers behind walls are a tough nut to crack.
I had debated not meeting dtay and exposing that he has an imp neighbor, in the idea that he wouldn't prioritze building my way. I'm not sure that wasn't the smarter choice.
dtay being up north pretty radically changes my plans, I think. I can out expand anyone of the other 4, but dtay can screw me over with a pretty simple plant in the north. I think I have to refocus my plants to block him. In that sense, I think I need at least one of my capital settlers to go to the whale and perhaps I need to whip out a settler in Huh? as well to get up the northern river.
if he plants where my warrior is, he could get the whale (though I think I'll always be able to take it back) - if he goes 1S of that, I won't be able to get the whale at all.
I think my next city has to go for the whale site, if not the actual whale.
Seriously. Moved some units around, found nothing interesting.
Graphs aren't interesting, demos aren't interesting. There are a couple of size 6 cities, one of which is HAK's capitol.
Only thing close to interesting is this poorly rendered map of fogbusting, Ignoble style.
There really aren't all that many place for barbs to come from mainly S, SW and NE. I can bust those areas pretty well so I can move around outside of culture borders safely.
My revised plan is to get the whales site, then the southern cow/copper/silver site. The cap will go warrior->settler->worker->settler. There will be whips and chops in there - fortunately, a math-powered chop is like 1/2 a settler and I can 2 pop whip a settler after a turn of builing one.
Huh? goes all food after it's worker is built to get to size 7 and a 3 pop library whip.
It is a nice day out - early October in the North East US is often some of the nicest weather of the year. Not too hot, no humidity, sunny.
So, this is the north. The red circles are definite city sites, the green/blue are alternates for another. I kind of like blue, as it makes an obvious site for molach for the pigs untenable. But it's not clear I'm going to get to plant any of those, depending on what dtay does.
There are 2 other noteworthy things in this pick: In the far lower right corner, you see a tile with molach culture. I'm pretty sure that's from his 3rd city, planted to the north and slightly west of his cap.
Also, Gavagai got Judaism - you can see he converted. HAK converted to Buddhism a while ago, too.
Not that score matters all that much right now - no one is killing the rest of the pack and no one is lagging hopelessly behind - but I gain like 19 points the next 2 turns.
Dems - high middle of the road all along. Molach is one of those ahead of me in GNP, which I presume means he hooked up his gold and is researching writing.
Not a big worry - I expect I'll catch up or pass those two next turn with math, another pop point and another warrior.
Turn 54, In Which AT Jumps To The Top Of The LeaderBoard
Seriously - I went from bottom 3rd to top 4, just by researching a tech. At this point, score means nothing...
I go up another 6 points next turn.
Really nothing else happened - lost Molach's charts again, so I guess I'll have to put some espionage on him while I try to get dtay's.
I get a settler next turn, which moves (slowly) to the whale spot, which I sent a worker to chop (no point in wasting 13 hammers). I think it has no effect on when I get the monument, but it does change my worker micro, which means urination time is going to grow slower. In 5 or 6 turns (dont' remember which) I'll get settlers in consecutive turns, one of which will go south, the other of which will plop in as a filler city for the cap - that will build another workboat using the horses while urination time grows. Might do that one faster (go settler next), because that horse might be underused for awhile while UT grows.
I'm pretty sure that graphs are updated a turn late, right? I'm asking, because I should have gotten a boost from math and I didn't get it this turn.
