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A new turn, and we've been found:
Oxphenbutazone is Gandhi of Netherlands (PHI / SPI / Fishing / Agri / East Indiaman).
Today I learned: The word oxyphenbutazone holds the title for the highest possible score for a single play under American tournament Scrabble rules, scoring 1,780 points across three triple-word-score squares, joining seven tiles to eight already played tiles. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)
Anyway, the warrior found an interesting place to make contact, right next to all three of our workers finishing a mine. We have a warrior on a hill with two turns of fortify bonus next turn, and his is wounded at 85%. He can roll the dice on trying to attack. If he does and succeeds, there's no nice way to say it, we're fucked. The alternative would be to bail out which delays copper. This is why I don't want scouting warriors running around... In his position I might try to snipe the workers, for a low chance but a massive payoff (stealing all three). If he does and wins, well, I take the blame for a massive noob mistake I guess... 
Kuro offered a peace treaty again, and I re-offered it back to him after seeing we have another player to the S now. Inching the scout forward:
His city claims the wet corn and clams in the first ring. It also doesn't look that defensible against an early game rush, does it?
We'll see horse next turn, and also if a bad die roll wrecks the game...
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Kuro took the 10 turns of peace, which I think is win / win for both of us, since it means we don't have to be hyper-vigilant about the border to the north.
AH is in, so let's see about horses:
 Right in the city site we desperately want next anyway? Okay! I think we do have to get there pretty quickly, though it would be a rather crazy pink dot site for Kuro right now. They know the horses are there for sure, if they have AH, since their scouting warrior was on the hill 1N2W.
Oh, I didn't notice before but see the tile yields on their crab in a screenshot last post? I think that means they have Sailing and a Lighthouse in their capital. Maybe they're actually going for GLH? It also makes sense for trade routes. I think it also might mean they can see what resources we have hooked up, maybe only if they've defogged enough coast between their city and our capital?
I was in a rush to get the workers off of the copper mine, so much so that I misclicked the warrior off like the noob I am. 
Oxy could have punished us by declaring and moving onto the copper, but he doesn't seem to be interested in being a pain in the butt and making us pay the price for noob mistakes, which is great news. I want to farm the grassland tile, but it's too risky right now with that warrior there. We'll have two warriors covering the city next turn.
Since military isn't do-or-die within the next couple of turns, I'm having Lasagne put a chop into another worker, since we'll need more to improve the gold/horse city as fast as possible. And with this much jungle it's going to be hard to have too many workers in the long run.
I'm making a go at Polytheism, since I figure it is less likely to be popular than Meditation. It's also on the road to Mono, Org. Religion, and Monarchy, all of which we'll want sooner or later. We could be going right for sailing or even writing though. I have no idea what is optimal.
I'm really curious how soon GLH is going to go down in this game. If someone's microing like crazy for it, it could literally be any turn now.
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good stuff those horses!
I see we build a monument in alDente, is that really needed if we get a religion in 6 turns that most likely will land in alDente? Or do you think we can get our 4th city (QuattroStagioni?) out in 6 turns?
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alDente really needs the border pop right now, with only two first ring non-jungle tiles. (And one of them I can't really improve because of the threat of Oxy's wandering warrior.) I don't actually think there's that good a chance we get the religion - it's awfully late. If we do, apparently how it works is that if you have more than one city it just picks a random city, other than the capital, weighted by highest population. So even if we do get Hinduism, the most likely holy city is Lasagne, and it's a die-roll.
My plan here is to "waste" some worker turns to get the road to the fourth city done very quickly, and settle it on T62. Hinduism would come in on T63, though if someone else gets it first we'll probably switch techs. I hope I didn't over-metagame it: maybe we could have just grabbed Meditation, the cheaper tech. It's only a turn or so cheaper though and it seems much less likely to be open since it's on the path for Priesthood and Oracle. Obviously Hinduism in the gold city would be amazing, but it's a die roll.
Scouting out Kuro:
He has only a warrior defending Sam Walton, and he's mining a plains hill in Standard Oil. You know what, I'm pretty sure he's going for GLH.
There is a high number in "Sabotage Production". Actually, I think we can know how many hammers they have. I dug up a T-Hawk quote in a massive Sullla post:
According to that formula, their numbers are:
Their EP: 208
Sabotage Production: 793
Investigate City: 702
BaseInvCost = 616
Multiplier = 1.1396
Hammers = 793 / (6 * 1.1396) = 116
So they are 116 hammers out of 200 through GLH, if this is correct. I'd love to know how close this is to reality! It's a clever method, not calculating the Espionage multiplier directly (which is really complicated) but just observing it from other derived numbers.
This is all academic, there's nothing much we can do to influence it. But it's the thing I love about these forums, it's about the only place I've ever seen where there are a bunch of people nerdier and more OCD and detail oriented than I am.
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Turn 58. We're roading along to the gold city. A settler will be whipped next turn, right after the capital grows to size 5 into unhappiness. A global happiness bonus will be really nice!
Kuro offered open borders, which means he has writing. I refused, because it would just mean he gets trade routes to us, and we don't, since we don't have Sailing yet. He double whipped his capital on something that wasn't the GLH, probably a worker or settler to use the overflow into GLH. Turn 61-62 is when I thought we could have had it, and it had fallen in turn 58 in previous games. So I wonder how much of a race there is right now for it!
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Turn 59. Buddhism fell finally! We're still in the race for Hinduism.
Demos stink after the whip to size 3:
After getting our 4th city, I hope we can finally consolidate and grow vertically a little bit. Lasagne with the pigs is now at +6 food, which is finally decent.
Our score is very low right now, partly because it includes the "echo" of the first settlement for every other team right now. It has been 20 turns since that happened.
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good we didn't go for the cheap religion :D
Sorry that I'm no so active, I'm a bit occupied with real life at the moment.
But'll try to give as much input as I can though =D
June 17th, 2013, 08:03
(This post was last modified: June 17th, 2013, 20:49 by WilliamLP.)
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There wasn't much going on this turn; we're proceeding with the plan to move a settler to the gold site next turn, and settle the turn after that.
Kuro had a power spike:
That looks like it could be 10 points. 10 point techs would be Iron Working and Horseback Riding. I don't know if it's possible he could have either of those by now though, also with Sailing and Writing. It's also possible he just finished an axe and a spear at the same time, or something other combination like that...
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Kuro has an axe approaching. It might be just to scout, or to be opportunistic, or both. The peace deal lasts for four more turns.
In any case, I plan to whip an axe in Lasagna next turn. It doesn't have good tiles to work yet anyway.
The horse / gold site will be settled next turn. Then Poly will come in the turn after that, if we don't get beat. Finally a worker is going back to improve AlDente a bit - it has been the black sheep of our empire for sure.
Oxy hasn't put a single EP toward us yet... Maybe he has multiple other contacts, I have no idea. His scouting warrior seems to have moved on and left us alone.
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This was a more eventful turn, since we settled our 4th city. I named it after The Great Flying One.
Needless to say, this is a fantastic site. I envision getting Moai in here, as well as the Heroic Epic. Though we're going to have to get an axe out soon to kill barbs and get to 10 Xp, speaking of which.
Kuro has an axe on the marked plain tile. I whipped an axe of our own out of lasagna to keep him from any funny business.
Over in the south, I moved a scouting warrior and we have another contact!
It's Kurumi who, you may recall, was the one who took a city off of Azza a while ago. So we can conclude there's a lot going on to the south over land!
We'll get Polytheism next turn, and have at least a coin flip chance at the religion. Ideally it would fall in Spaghetti, of course! But I think the chances are 1 in 4, if it's weighted by population. That would mean a 2 in 4 chance of it falling in Lasagne. That would be good too, since it needs a border pop and the shrine there would be a less appealing military target in the long run.
With the fourth city, our demos are looking more respectable, and will be better once we start hooking things up.
This turn (or earlier) is when we could have had the Great Lighthouse, if we went all out for it. But, without copper close I can't say it was a realistic option at all. Honestly I'm quite surprised it hasn't fallen yet.
Any thoughts about long term options now? I think we need to know what the south looks like a little more, in terms of how close we are to the other players. I'd love to claim a gems site, but they are pretty far from the capital, both the site to the south of AlDente, and the jungle wilds to the east of Spaghetti.
For tech, I'm thinking of something like Sailing -> Writing -> Iron -> Math -> Calendar. We just have so many calendar resources that Iron and Calendar can't come too soon. Writing first would be for madrassas to speed research. Sailing is a no brainer I think, because it gives +3 food in the capital, and also means we can start getting trade routes along the coast. Though, if Kuro gets GLH, I'd only give him open borders with quite a bit of hesitation, since he'd get a lot more value from it than we would.
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