[SPOILERS] Pindicator as Qin Shi of China - Boring Ol' Vanilla

[pindicator]

Turn 122

Another good bit of luck!



I think we passed 11 forges a few turns back, game



The quest rewards for this one are considerably better:

Quest6:
Master Blacksmith
Prereq: City with Forge
Obsolete: NATIONALISM or PRINTING_PRESS or EDUCATION or GUNPOWDER or ASTRONOMY
Active/Weight: 25/500
Aim:
Build default number of players for this world size forges (7 for standard) while not loosing the city triggering the quest
Result:
1.1 Copper resource is revealed
2.All Swordsman units gain the Shock promotion
3.IF you have a state religion gain 1 engineer specialist in the triggering city

I think the worst one of those is better than what I got for 11 libraries.


But don't worry. There is a dark lining to this silver cloud:



If I were to pick the engineer specialist it would go here, in Rhi'anon. Which would be a great GP farm one day, if I can push the borders back from it's 3 culturally oppressive neighbors.

[Commodore]

Pity you aren't Rome, eh?

[pindicator]

Pity you aren't Rome, eh?

And miss out on Cho-Ko-Nus!?

Speaking of which, I should probably get around to teching Machinery sometime soon...


Turn 123

Quest reward is ours!



It was tempting to see where the copper would spawn just to test it out -- especially since both my sources of metal are tenuously close to the Cyneheard border (thanks for that, Commodore! ) -- but I opted for the safe reward of the free engineer specialist. Shock sadly is less and less of a worthwhile promotion, otherwise my 8 swordsmen would have taken it. If that had been Cover, I would have snatched it up in a second.

Because Barry's turns are finally numbered. What is the number, you may ask? 129



By the way, a big fat THANK YOU to Parkin for being a pain in the ass and chopping every tree in sight. You can see his worker moving to chop the last one. I really appreciate him taking better care of an abandoned civ than the actual team that was playing it.

The two-prong attack is sadly necessary, as I could see Parkin doing something like throwing all his archers out in a different direction than my attack in an attempt to capture a border city before I could take his capital. Things like this I wouldn't have worried about so much if Team Smurftastic had stayed at the helm.


I'm really considering going for Theology before Civil Service. I really want to build AP - if only I didn't need irrigation so desperately. I've slid down to #10 in demos, although GNP at #11 is when I'm at 0% tech, so I don't feel bad about that one at all. Crop Yield and MFG, though... I think I need to stop whipping and start growing. I can almost 1-turn Code of Laws, and then Civil Service is about 3.5 turns at full burn. That doesn't really give me much time to grab Theology, because my next great person is due in 8.

But maybe this will help?



Hopefully this at least starts the ball rolling as for discussion. I settled on this figure as costing OldHarry 0.75gpt per city per turn for a happy resource. That may be a little high; they may only have 4 or 5 cities that can use it. But they have 20 total and I have no idea what their landmass looks like, so I'm guesstimating. I can probably be talked down to 75g for 10 turns, but I'd be taking it on faith that they don't have that many unhappy cities. Or maybe they don't want any happiness for a while still and don't feel the need to accept. Still, gotta try and raise some funds.

[pindicator]

Turn 124

Short update today as all the big themes have already been touched on; we're just continuing to play them out as planned.

Turned on the research and one-turned CoL. I get up to 5th in GNP when I go max research, probably because I'm just not as big as some people.

Dtay's power is a bit alarming but I'm not convinced he's coming my way. For one he isn't paying a lot of attention to me: if he was paying attention he would have canceled the 1gpt he's been gifting me for 20 turns. Or he wants it there to buy me off. (Or is all an elaborate ruse and I'm about to be stomped...)

[Ceiliazul]

[pindicator]

Turn 126

I didn't realize this until just now, but I'm currently #5 in score. That's not half bad. Demos have me more around 6-10, which feels a little more accurate.

Anyway, It's finally time to clean up my mess:

[pindicator]

Turn 127

Boooooooo

Gawdzak seems to have pulled Barry-turn-playing duties, and he just happened to play right before me. So I got double turned a little bit.

[pindicator]

Turn 129



We got a little lucky: only lost 1 catapult despite having 3 battles under 50% odds.



Theology is next; I'm going to try and build AP right when we trigger that golden age. And we dont' really need Monarchy until the end of the golden age, so I think we'll do Theology -> Paper -> Monarchy and try to get some religious wonders.

[Ceiliazul]

Most anticlimactic kill ever.

[pindicator]

Well, they quit when the game was over for them. At that point it was just mop up and I wasn't going to go in until it was guaranteed.