[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[scooter]

I could simply gift him the Dye once hooked. He might take that. However, I think he may be a natural enemy long-term, so I'm sort of inclined to just roll with it, and if he wants to make an expensive attack on a mediocre city, that's his prerogative. I dunno, I sort of feel like why bother settling the city if I'm not going to be able to work the Dye either.


One thing that may not be super obvious in the screenshot but is easier to tell in-game is that the plains hill looks like a 1-tile island from fog-gazing. This implies that the nearest Bing city must be 4 tiles away from the settler/archer, not 3.

[Zed-F]

I'm fine with settling where we originally intended on White, especially if we are content to defend our plant with culture builds. I probably wouldn't gift him dye outright, since we think he's a natural enemy; in the long term, the ability to grow our bigger cities using the dye is probably more valuable than working the dye plot itself, though the latter is maybe better in the short term. We might conceivably trade dye to him to get something in exchange (like another lux) and might give him a discount / small sweetener on such a deal. It's your call, we're just discussing options and other items to consider.

Good to hear that the 1-tile island isn't likely his core. It looks like Bing intends to settle for the cow. I'm not sure if that city will be on the row 1N of cow or the row 2N of cow (or even 1W of cow). It's a bit hard to tell where the land up there extends to / ends from the screenshot. If he settles adjacent to cow then he will have a city 3 tiles from White dot, otherwise his nearest city will continue to be 4 tiles distant.

[scooter]

What could go wrong with sticking with original white dot.





It's very tempting to just build a Chariot real quick and raze that Bing city, but it's probably not worth it yet. Two Archers in the city for us. I'm working on hooking Stone now and will swap to Walls once it's hooked.





Settled Kartool over here and put an Archer in. Will send over either a Warrior or additional Archer from Ubaryd in the next couple turns. The hill defense here helps quite a bit.





I've completed circumnav, so our Cothons should be at full go once completed. Quite a bit of uncontested land still between Yuris and Superdeath which makes me feel better about the land grab I've done. Yuris will have other places to go. Let's run through the core/builds as Zed-F pointed out I haven't done in awhile.





I've decided it's time to hook the Copper, so I'm squeezing out a couple more cheap MP warriors to occupy backline cities. Unta and Pale are building settlers for Tundra and some other city - either east island or the Furs. Pale has put a few hammers into Moai, but once the Stone is hooked I'll start dumping overflow into it. Worth noting that both of those forests are chopped down to 1T - I've been saving them for a rainy day since core forests are so rare here. Part of me thinks to just dump them into Moai. However, it's worth noting that Hanging Gardens and Pyramids are both still on the board. So I think I need to seriously consider making a run at one of them at this stage. In any case, I think I'll whip Pale's settler to line up with Unta's completion so that I can get them both on the same boat out of here. If Stone is not yet hooked, I can store the overflow in Wealth.


Aren is slow-building a Worker right now at happy cap. Plan A was to whip a settler there next. However, I am also considering doing a wave of Barracks 2 pop -> overflow axe builds in various cities, and Aren would be a strong candidate for that. I think it's time to consolidate defenses everywhere as my 12 cities and touching borders will be attracting attention in a bad way.





In the east I'm doing some tile assignment shuffling. Ubaryd's Rice will be online in 2 more turns, so in the meantime I went ahead and whipped Hissar's Granary. This let me share the Clams with Ubaryd and give the Fish to Kartool while also completing the Granary at a decent foodbox timing. Then Hissar can retake the Clams at size 2, and I can ferry a Worker over to farm the Wheat for Kartool. Capustan whipped the worker so it can help with the Stone, then at least one of those workers will head south to support Tundra city, which has an ETA of T100 if I do not whip Unta, which I'm not necessarily planning to do.





Here's a wide shot of the whole empire. These last few cities were definitely a bit pricy, so break-even tech is down to about 30%. However, the actual tech rate at break-even is still mostly fine (~50bpt), so I'm not too concerned.






That is going to attract some unwanted attention if I didn't have it already. Like I said, Barracks and unit wave needed next I think.

[T-hawk]

Without a lot of cottages, economic recovery will be slower than on a typical land map, right? What's the math for all those trade routes - how big do the cities need to get to start getting better numbers there?

[Zed-F]

I've completed circumnav, so our Cothons should be at full go once completed. Quite a bit of uncontested land still between Yuris and Superdeath which makes me feel better about the land grab I've done. Yuris will have other places to go.

Did you get the news event saying circumnav had completed? I thought we needed Optics for circumnav to take effect in this mod. Am I remembering RtR instead? If we do have circumnav already, that's even better, though of course we still will want Optics in due course for Caravels and vision.

Understood on the need for barracks and military, though I think we can get away with a more natural build-up rather than a big push for a lot of defenses quickly, since nobody else has a lot of military yet either. Aren has a big population right now but it's a front line city so it does make sense to make it a military center, though I do like the idea of whipping a settler out first if we can afford the maintenance costs. Long-term it's not going to be able to keep all the food resources it has now that allowed it to grow big, since we'll need to cede one of them to a dye city to its east, and it will probably be sharing the other seafood with a city on the jungle hill to the west (which will also have bananas, to be fair). I am not sure whether we should plan for Aren to stay big in the future or to stay smaller for more efficient whips, and build up pop in other cities (e.g. Pale with Moai) instead. But we might not need to make that decision until we settle cities east and west of Aren somewhere down the line (e.g. post-Calendar?) Alternatively, if we are worried about numbers of build queues for local defense production on the border, we could settle that city NW of Y'Ghatan, where we have forests to get its infrastructure up to speed more quickly, sooner rather than later.

Do we have a workboat available to scout E of Furs along the ice and SE of Black Coral? It's possible there's a good site over there we should be considering. Certainly our next settler is Black dot, after that I'm less certain about prioritization. I don't know that we go after the 1-tile jungle islands for the fish north of Kartool though; that seems a bit ambitious given the proximity of Bing's culture and the lack of other resources we can see.

[scooter]

I think base routes > 1c are fairly far away right now, although I realize I've done my counting for city distance based on Standard size map, while this is Small. So maybe it's not impossible. But let's just assume 1c base routes for now, here's the breakdown for just the pre-Astro phase of the game.



Current

2 routes at 1c base
+225% (PRO + Capital + IC) => 3c per route


Total: 6c per city


After Cothons

This is tricky because half the value comes immediately and half after completing Optics (circumnav).


3 routes at 1c base
+275% -- +325% (50% Cothon, 50% Circumnav post-Optics)


3 routes at 3c pre-Optics
3 routes at 4c post-Optics


Total: 9c or 12c per city


Investment: 50h (100h - EXP) to net 3 or 6c in each city.


Castles

I am going to assume post-Optics here as I imagine we're fairly likely to tech Optics before Engineering. Castles give us +1 trade route and require Walls first.


4 routes at 1c base
+325%

4 routes at 4c

Total: 16c per city


50h (150 for Walls + Castles - PRO - Stone) to net 4c


(75% likelihood I made a mistake somewhere in this)


This is overall pretty good and just generally raises the floor for each city significantly. Your typical cottage city in a normal game around Engineering is probably sitting on two 3c foreign IC routes, so 6c rather than 16c. However, in this scenario I'm also denying them to other players, and there are only 3 players in this game interested in foreign routes, so that's a bonus too. This will still leave us commerce-constrained, but I think less so than the other players. There's a lot of other factors deeper into the game such as Mercantilism and eventually boosting some base values above 1. There's also limitations obviously. The trade routes keep the economic floor high more than affecting the ceiling as much. Like, right now my slider is low, but I think my break-even tech rate is probably near the top of the field regardless. Everyone else is having to deal with the lack of the water commerce boosters too.

[scooter]

Did you get the news event saying circumnav had completed? I thought we needed Optics for circumnav to take effect in this mod. Am I remembering RtR instead? If we do have circumnav already, that's even better, though of course we still will want Optics in due course for Caravels and vision.

I was using the term generally - mostly just saying we have met the threshold necessary in order to trigger it immediately post-Optics. I was concerned that by waiting, cultural borders might prevent me from completing it until I get Caravels out. This way I have it ready to trigger immediately.

Do we have a workboat available to scout E of Furs along the ice and SE of Black Coral? It's possible there's a good site over there we should be considering.

I'm thinking about this now. I'm thinking of sending the east island scout south and having my Galley that is sort of down there ferry it over to the island(s) down that way. Though they may not have much of anything on them, so it's tough to say. The other thing is I will likely have the WB east of Yuris return to some extent to scout down there. I also neglected to mention that I found a Fish by the Marble south of Pale, but in a way that I would have to settle on the Marble to claim. Not pressing, but good to know for the future.

[Commodore]

Ooo, very cool. I'd be willing to mapmake this. I'd even compromise my ethics and make mirrored capitals/toroidal if you guys wanted.

[scooter]

Ooo, very cool. I'd be willing to mapmake this. I'd even compromise my ethics and make mirrored capitals/toroidal if you guys wanted.

The fact that I keep finding ice exactly where I'd expect ice to be on a cylindrical map keeps messing with my head.

[Zed-F]

Sounds like Furs has priority over Yellow if we need to establish a southern border with Bing as well as a northern border. That probably also impacts our priority to settle our Marble, too.

EDIT: We’ve said we wanted to get a scout down to the SE corner, and bring back a WB from Yuris-land to map the south… we might want to get a scouting WB down from our core to do the same in the far south on the west side of the map. It makes a big difference if we can wrap N-S now, or only with Astro, as far as defenses and settlement priorities go. I’m not sure from our explorations just how much ice is down there, but we know Yuris and Cairo have safe N-S edges because of Astro reservations to their south; it wouldn’t surprise me too much if there are similar Astro N-S barriers across the map for fairness (or ice, where there isn’t). But either way, we probably want to find out.