[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[The Black Sword]

It was all beginning to look up.
Guess we'll just have to build some cottages, but we're so late with them already.

On the bright side, I can get another settler out from Sleeper instead to settle that sheep spot, and finish off the HA afterward. It means there's no room on the galley for the missionary though, so he has to come out earlier and walk the long way. So I'm getting an axe in Fortunato for the extra overflow.

The shrine is worth a cool 12gpt already:

We now have 3 priest slots here, I'm thinking of running them for the next GP. 17t at 3 priests, 23t at 2. The other option is in Sleeper, hiring an Engineer and building a Library for some scientists. Both GP and GS are probably golden age material, Engineer might be good for bulbing Machinery, I doubt we'll have the tech to reach any wonders. So, I think it might as well be here to make use of the wonder gpp.

[The Black Sword]

Got this from Old Harry. I declined. The capital is probably the only city which could make immediate use out of the extra happy. It would be nice to have some friends on this continent though.

[The Black Sword]

Turns out the Heroic Epic wasn't the only militaristic wonder on the Aesthetics -> Literature tree, dtay also picked up the SoZ for a further +2xp. So we'll be facing triple promoted melee units from all of his barracks cities. Fortunately his power is still relatively low:


He's currently teching Monotheism, which could be good for us if he spreads Hinduism around. I'm thinking of giving Sleeper a barracks and stable and just continually building HA there. It's the only city with the base production for those to be worth it I think, and still has enough food to be double whipping every 10 turns, and we'll need to do something about our military soon once dtay turns his back on. We haven't shown him any HAs yet, so hopefully if he does come again he will go light on spears.

Pindicooter never re-accepted the Ivory for Gems trade, perhaps because they have since got a number of calendar resources up. Fortunately Commodore has a spare gold to trade us which is just as good. Old Harry has also just teched Alphabet and I offered him OB. I'm not sure how much it will be worth or if he will accept, we'll see. I'm not sure about trading maps with him anymore either, to keep everyone in the dark about the island for as long as possible, though it seems suttree at least knows:



He was kind enough to let our WB live, so he's in our good books IMO.

EP points are still on Old Harry, I think maybe Commodore now that we have graphs? He's the other one who could attack us.

Cleaned up a barb axe messing around our borders:

1 more xp for sentry, which I would like to keep peeking at New Xerxes.

I whipped in Peregrine's Granary and a Bagabond's Settler comes out next turn.

He needs 2 movers to hit us and we haven't seen many chariots so I felt safe enough doing this.

We've got most of the island uncovered now, though it seems I missed an overview shot. It looks like the sheep city and oasis city will be founded T113.

So, our demos probably at a temporary high before I triple whip those:


Some thoughts: Should we go for an espionage economy? In normal BTS, I think that'd be a great way to keep up, with Hinduism spread in New Xerxes. But RBmod doubles(?) the base cost and removes the religion modifiers, needs some investigation.

We obviously need to build a market in the capital, it really is a no brainer at half price and a shrine in the city. Should we then run merchants? The problem with Priests is that they're only good for the GA, I'm not sure if ~20t will be a great time for a GA, it's hard for me to judge. Our breakeven is currently a rather high 70%, so putting up a library and pushing for an Academy might not be a bad idea either. That would certainly require cottaging the river tiles(er yes I haven't done this yet ) and growing high, maybe with HR, which is best got to in a golden age. Essentially we need some sort of great person plan .

[The Black Sword]

Here's the island. The whales down the bottom would be great to get, now unlocked at Sailing instead of Optics and doubled by the market. You can sort of see there's also a water link to another bit of land in the south. The eastern island is almost certainly suttree's but maybe we could pick it up if he collapses to Old Harry.

Dtay predictably picked up TGL btw, he's done really well out of this tech path, nice use out of his Philo trait.

[Jowy]

I counted 16 cities total (or 15 if we leave that south no-resource spot to Old Harry). It could be much worse Too bad about the Colossus, looks like MH read the meta correctly and went for it. Suttree's island is most definitely his. There indeed seems to be more land to the south of "our" big island. Could be connected to the eastern continent by the looks of it, though an island would be better for our purposes. It sure as hell isn't meant for us to settle, but still worth checking out at some point. As for Dtay, he will attack and he only has two targets to choose from. I just can't see him investing those hammers to +EXP and also having the Aggressive trait, but then not invading his neighbor. Best case scenario for us would be to be on the side of one of the giants as they go after each other. I hope that they both recognize we could be an asset to them. However we do need military techs and actual military... It would not take much to walk over us right now. Even if we could be an asset to them against the other, we would be a much bigger asset as part of their empire. Need enough deterrents that if they want to take our lands, they have to force it, not just walk over us with minimal investment. I know we kinda had this discussion already, and I'm okay with the risks we're rolling with to catch up, but thought I'd reiterate anyway.

Hinduism is spreading nicely, let's hope someone takes it as their state religion.

[Jowy]

You asked about espionage economy. Sorry, I have no freaking clue about that RB Mod based on the change list seems to nerf espionage quite heavily, so it's probably much worse than in any espionage economy guide one could find. If you are seriously considering it, play some practice games with it.

[The Black Sword]

I saw this weird avatar and didn't immediately connect it was you .

We did get lucky with this island, we had the easier claim to it but it's a good thing Nakor and suttree seem to have run into trouble too.

I think you're right in your geopolitical assessment. I think dtay will be coming back for more eventually. He took Old Harry's whale for horses offer btw, it's bad news for us that they seem to have such a good relationship. For the moment, I think Old Harry has enough on his plate, dtay's power remains low(especially considering he has more to defend) and I'm keeping an eye on the power graph each turn. While that doesn't change, we need to take advantage of it as much as possible IMO.

On that point, I've been considering the next tech path following currency and wondering to what extent we can skip the military techs of construction and feudalism.

CoL->CS ->(golden age) -> Monarchy -> Feudalism

Monarchy -> Feudalism ->CoL ->(golden age) -> CS

I think Code of Laws is going to be worth it if we're using a golden age to revolt. It costs 400 adjusted beakers, saves 150 on the CS pre-req, so we're paying 250 to run a load of specialists during the GA.

A merchant trade mission is worth 1100g at least on the other continent, and we're talking about getting out the 300gpp and probably the 400gpp GPs out during the GA. Getting an engineer would also be good to bulb Machinery, which is 939b. Unfortunately a scientist doesn't bulb anything good until we want Paper -> Education, so it would be an Academy. I think an Academy in the Bureau capital would be quite good actually, since we'll be running 100% science(so getting roughly 45bpt extra) for quite a few turns due to the GM.

So, Great Prophet out of the capital for the GA and then set up two other cities to starve out if necessary a Merchant and a Scientist.

That was a bit of a side track, so the question is, do we need Construction first, if not, how long can we delay Feudalism. The second path is 150b cheaper than the first, I should figure out just how much we'd save by getting Bureau earlier.

I checked out the Espionage economy btw, and I don't think it's worth it because of the RB mod nerfs. Your missions now cost roughly 4 times the beaker cost of a tech. You can halve that with the stationary spy and eventually, when you have built a lot more EP than your target, you can halve it again back to roughly the original cost. The distance modifier is roughly cancelled out by the trade route modifier, I doubt our culture modifer will be particularly high and RB mod removes the religion ones. It seems Krill did a good job of nerfing it .

Oh, also, I might try a map+OB trade with Old Harry again. We'll soon have 4 cities on the island, with 2 trade routes each, so we'll get an extra 8cpt from 3 commerce trade routes. Meanwhile, assuming he has a full set of island trade routes, he'll get 4gpt from trade routes with our island. Unfortunately, he doesn't know this and is likely to decline again. Maybe we should throw in the 2gpt to even the trade up and let him know it's worth something.

[The Black Sword]

Heh, what timing:

We still only have 1 city on the island currently though so it isn't that good of a deal. Also, I figured if he started out at 20g, he'd be willing to go lower. Old Harry logged in and we agreed to 1gpt and 5g. He has two island cities of his own, so we're getting 3gpt out of the deal, another 1gpt next turn and look at this map:




Let Hinduism spread far and wide!
We're about to found our second island city next turn, will they get the trade routes from it? I always mess up the rules for trade routes.

Btw:

I didn't have that gold tile uncovered, it looked like a desert hill to me so I ignored it. Too late now, maybe we should have tried to found on the gold. It would still have been very hard to defend though.

We also met Nakor:


Who offered us a map trade which I declined, maybe after we settle that fish/oasis/sheep spot.

I'm not sure where to settle the next city, I should really set up another settler plan somewhere but I'm not sure where to found next:


Perhaps there should be another filler spot but there's no food in the middle of the island.

[regoarrarr]

One note - I'm pretty sure that SoZ only gives +2XP in the city that it's built - not all cities

[Jowy]

I didn't have that gold tile uncovered, it looked like a desert hill to me so I ignored it. Too late now, maybe we should have tried to found on the gold. It would still have been very hard to defend though.

If Dtay didn't beeline for us and own us, then yeah it would have been a good city site :P After that happened, not so much.

I don't see a reason to plant any extra cities on the island. I checked over the spots last time I logged in and they were good.

On the GP / Tech path plans: Academy is at least stronger here than normally, since we have a strong capital and everything else is a shithole. Machinery bulb sounds very good.

EDIT: When to get Construction? Well if we're getting longbows soon, we probably won't be attacking out, so we could delay it.