RBP3 - [SPOILERS] - Team DIM (Mehmed of HRE)

[Ilios]

i think the good spacemanmf was referring to "golf" rather than "gold" which i also found hilarious at the time since it worked so well

Haha, as long as it's Tiger Woods golf...

hmmm that's a tricky location for portugal. since toroidal wrap is pretty well established, we should be able to meet them by sending a scout E but that's not a direction we'd planned on prioritising anytime soon. warrior N/NW to meet rome and then SW from there to portugal anyone?

I think Rome's warrior is on it's way to India, so we could move Brute NW from Aztec and back south to meet up with him, and continue from there to Portugal.

i'm not sure we should read rome's request to meet people as an indication they're in as far as the first round of tech trading is concerned

Apparently, Portugal has some qualms having Rome in the alliance. They did a "french" move with Dantki's second city.

[meatbalz]

Apparently, Portugal has some qualms having Rome in the alliance. They did a "french" move with Dantki's second city.

i might be worrying too much, but this is really starting to concern me.

we have the most dangerous early neighbour, bar none, right on our border.

they're going to get excluded from an early tech alliance we're a part of and will suddenly find themselves in a big hole tech-wise. surely they'll feel the best way to catch up is via pointy-stick research.

they've already met several other civs who have had several turns to achieve the number 1 aim with rome early, that is, make sure they attack someone else.

and we haven't met them. honestly, doesn't this worry anyone else, because it's starting to frighten the crap out of me. again if it were up to me i'd make it an IMMEDIATE priority to make contact and decide for ourselves.

we know they've had issues with portugal, they don't know we know... we could "encourage" them to look in their direction for expansion. we could make out we're quite far from them without being too specific. if they mention the tech alliance and the precedent with portugal we could say we'll negotiate on their behalf. if they're very non-committal we could enter preparation mode early and get a choke on. there are 1000 possibilities, none of which are open to us until we make contact.

i don't remember the name of the warrior currently going N (khan/cain?). we could send him NE first and then W to meet aztec.

[Ilios]

Brute, our northern scout, is only 5-10 tiles removed from Aztec land, so I'd rather meet up first, see what they can tell us. We can then swing him NE and E to try and find Rome.

I'm still not convinced they are all that close to us, but the only way to find out is to locate them.

I really like those peaks to our SE, because with Midas to our south, and another city to be placed to DIM's SE, our S and SE will be very hard to attack, especially since those peaks will give us a view of anything that might be headed our way from France.

I'll check with Krill if Portugal has a scout moving west, and then we can decide if we want to move Tricky in their direction after meeting up with Carthage.

As soon as we can spare a chariot, we can move him SE and E to scout those lands some more.

[Ilios]

New turn has been played. Nothing special to report other than Brute ending on a forest but next to lion. He's woody I, so I expect him to survive.

We can still finish BW in 4 turns at break-even research, which will leave us 22 gold to burn through when we head for The Wheel. We'll have around 20 beakers to spend per turn, so we should get it in 5-6 turns.

[Ilios]

Guys, if there is copper in our current lands, I would like to consider delaying the settler a bit, and build a spearman for either new city or Midas (preferably Midas, as it is very vulnerable to two movers, and a second warrior wouldn't amount to much more security). This will free Midas' warrior to protect Horse city.
If there's no copper, we can just continue as planned.

[meatbalz]

that's fine by me assuming my preferred option of extending the NAP with france isn't available to us. i think all of us would rather be building settlers + workers rather than military and france is the only threat to midas so we should work towards that.

that being said, i'm on the same page as you ilios re: security. i've said 100x we're a slow burner, if we play smart + conservative we'll come to the fore in the midgame so let's keep it tight for now.

rsch update:

at the moment BW comes in T47, the capital will grow to 4 meaning we get 13 beakers from capital, 8 from midas, so TW comes in @

21 beakers/turn raw
22 beakers/turn (+1 for having a city)
23 beakers/turn (5.3% bonus for meeting 3 civs who have TW)

so we finish it in 5 turns with ~7 beakers to spare.

it's worth checking whether we can finish BW with lots of overflow, we only need 16 beakers to get TW in 4 turns instead of 5 & we'll be putting in 26/turn into BW once the gold mine's done. i'd need to access the game to work it out, specifically how many beakers we have put into BW, what tiles we're working now, and ETA to gold mine being done.

[Ilios]

Well I'm not saying we should go to full-bore military production...
I'd just feel safer if we'd have Archer/Spearman in Midas.
Speaking of which, with the amount of research we'll have, do you think we could finish Archery before The Wheel in time to start building a chariot in Horse city? I'm thinking yes, given that current ETA to found horse city is around T58? That would allow us to finish the Wheel just in time for that Horse Pasture to finish. I'm thinking we could then 1-pop whip another worker in the capital and put the overflow in an archer.

Don't forget we'll get another 2 commerce from T50 onwards, when our cities connect.
I'd prefer to keep break-even now and have BW come in when our worker is ready to chop. We could go 100% research for both Archery and TW and probably finish them both in 10 turns. (currently 22 gold left in the bank, should be good for 10-11 turns of research)

[meatbalz]

right you are re: the 2 commerce.

so would be
T48 23/108
T49 46/108
T50 69/108
T51 94/108
T52 done w/ ~11 overflow

that means if we're able to get not 16 but 14 beakers overflowing from BW (essentially half a turn of rsch given we get 26/turn once gold tile is finished), we could have TW by T51, and archery by T57 assuming 1T anarchy.

regardless we'd still have enough to finish both by T58. it's nitpicking & worth no more than ~4 beakers, but again it's in our interests to put in the last turn of BW research @ 100% as we get a 20% bonus on it due to pre-req discount, and not on TW/archery. it won't change the ETA for BW but it's worth doing for the extra beakers.

archery and TW are both 108 beakers, 216 total, we're putting out 23-25 so 9-10 turns for both. ilios + dazed you guys can choose which order to rsch them in depending on preferred build order. i'm assuming we'll have enough for our workers to do that we won't waste any worker turns by delaying TW for archery.

course this could all be academic if it turns out we have copper at DIM

[Ilios]

Well Archery gets a bonus from Hunting right?

If you prefer, we can go 100% research the last turn to get the overflow with bonus, but we'd need to make sure we have enough gold to finish both TW and Archery in one go.

And I'm pretty sure all four civs we've met so far have The Wheel or will have it when we go for it. Not certain about Aztec, but I think Carthage has it as well, so hopefully we meet them before researching The Wheel so we can get a 5 civ bonus (or 6!).

[meatbalz]

hi ilios, i think per your C&D india don't have TW yet??? did i miss it? that's why i only had 3 civ bonus. it doesn't matter in this case as it gets rounded down so in any case it's still a 1 beaker/turn bonus

as for archery i really should have the tech chart open when i do these things yeah, we get a 20% bonus, meaning if we're putting out 21 raw beakers, if 3 civs we've met have it we get it in 4 turns flat.

we're losing 2 gold/turn at 100% so we have 11 turns' worth, more than enough to put 1 turn into BW and finish both archery + TW @ max before or at worst the same turn city 2 is founded

we'll know whether archery or TW is the better option once BW is in, if we have copper at DIM we might need a road to hook it up if it's not on a river. if we don't have copper getting an archer into midas is prudent, as you said. if we have river copper if we have copper in the tile we've already mined [/wishful thinking]

once we get pottery on T62 we can start putting up cottages, which we'll need to do to support a relatively early marble city that can hold its own in a culture battle