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We'll surely want a Granary in Steel Wheels at some point  As to Marble, I think Babylon's got shipped to Maya, but Carthage should have theirs back from England, so I'll ask them how their fixed for HE (they were also 1 XP short). We can try to work our schedule around them (or even them around us if they're still at 9 XP!).
I whipped Paint It Brown, and swapped the cottage to Blake. Moved Lucky, Marianne & Bianca towards Blake. Lucky should head across to garrison our new city. Speaking of which, shall we send Jerry 2S of Sirian to mine the hill it will share with the new city? then it can build culture tout de suite to get access to its food (I don't think we should lend it Sirian's rice)?
If we're going to get some Knights rolling, how about whipping a Stable with overflow to a HA?
Next turn at Steel Wheels, Cyrinda should move to complete the road seeing as we want to worked the grass forest to get to 10/10 culture. Jana can start a road on the pigs, and Carla road the grass hill mine.
How about a slow worker in Uberfish next turn? Can chop the the 3rd ring forest there then maybe start watermilling at Sticky Fingers: we're aiming for Rep Parts from Liberalism which makes plains watermills 1-3-1, so same a river grass mines (but sadly double worker turns though they do get a further boost with Electricity).
Had a chat with Nakor of Inca, and told him we wanted to settle our FP city. He, of course, wants to settle 3S1E but didn't seem keen on the culture fight (perhaps knowing we got the GA from Music). He also wants to settle 1N5W of Kalin's Burgers, so I said he should chat to Maya about that spot
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Oops, I forgot about the Granary in Steel Wheels. Yes, we want one. 
I like the idea of mining the hill that the new city will share with Sirian. Whipping a stable in Blake sounds like a good idea too.
I'm not at home to log into the game but if we move a worker off of an unroaded forest before finishing a chop, then we lose a worker turn when we have to move back onto it. I'm not sure if that's what would happen if we moved Cyrinda though.
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Cyrinda has roaded that forest tile, so we're good to move off it. Logged in and ended turn
Got a response from Carthage, who will complete their HE in 3-4 turns, and then gift us their marble. Sweet.
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Turn 114 Partial Report
Mint finished in Paint it Brown, started Courthouse (any other suggestions?). Stable whipped at Blake. Both of these cities have the option of growing in 2 turns, or growing in 3 turns but working better tiles (the Dyes and the Horses). I've left both of them set to grow in 3. Next turn we can switch Paint it Brown from working the Oasis to the new farm, and it will grow at the end of that turn.
The workers at Steel Wheels all roaded as suggested, and the city is working the 2/1/0 forest. I switched Uberfish to build a Worker, as suggested.
Jerry put a third turn into the plains cottage at Blake that we may never use on her way to mine the hill 2S of Sirian. L'Wren continued to build a cottage for Uberfish. Marianne, Bianca, and Chrissie all worked on the farm on the flood plains that Blake and Paint it Brown share. Marsha started a cottage 2S of Ruby Tuesday.
A barb Axe appeared east of our next city site. Lucky Maya should be able to get good odds on it in 2 or 3 turns, but we should probably either keep the Mace around, or send Black up north as backup. We could also bring Jack down, but we'd have to do so without healing him (although we can give him a promo to partially heal).
We need Iron to build Knights, so we may want to prioritize getting the Iron hooked up at Steel Wheels over the Pigs.
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Let's keep the Mace around for now rather than move Jack (whom we need to move back to his fogbusting perch once he heals). I'd probably still favour the food over the Iron at Steel Wheels given we can pre-build HAs which will convert to Knights when we connect the Iron (and have Guilds).
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Are you going to log in and finish the turn? There are still military units unmoved.
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I'll log in today when I get home (in 1-2 hours) to complete the turn.
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I completed the turn, promoting Black in order to unlock HE, and making a poor move with Poison Ivy, who should move back whence she came (to clear fog). Moved the Mace to confront the barb axe, and moved Lucky across as well.
Important email from Krill re Liberalism. I reviewed the draft before sending. See also our most recent chat for an idea re: MoM & Taj.
Quote:For those of you that dislike translating into English ,I'm sorry for the length of this email...1200+ words was more than I expected to write, but I think it was necessary to explain why I think MT is our best bet right now.
- Hide quoted text -
This brings me on to a central theme of this email: What is it that we as a group want, and as individuals, how can we get what we each need from this group.
As a group, we need space to expand into. Some of us, England, Babylon and Myself, have plenty. Others in Carthage and Mali need to start looking at expanding via warfare sooner than that. maya has at least enough space to double in size. Babylon, Maya and myself have to deal with Byz though, and in fact I have 4 neighbours that I need to be prepared to fight off. So how do we reconcile that difference in needs?
First of all, what do we each have in common? We all need to continue to research, some of us to funding and others to do the teching. This isn't going to change even if we are in war, it might even be more important to tech to the next era of units (like we are discussing now). We need each of MT, Rifling and Steel, what we are discussing is the order in which to get them, so it is fair to say that we shouldn't decrease our tech rate until we have them all.
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I know alot of you won't understand the relevance, but this is exactly the mistake that Kaz made in the MTDG. They built a massive army of maces ,upgraded and slaved, threw away a tech lead,and when they lost the attack, they opened the game up to SANCTA. The lesson from that game is simple: do not throw away a tech lead for an attack that isn't needed. We can't use Nationhood until we have established each economy so that it doesn't rely on one Bureaucracy powered academy city. I am perhaps the only one that would benefit from Nationhood due to Spi.
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So, if we go for Rifling, and we cripple our collective tech, what do we get? We get a 110 hammer, 1 move unit that has 25% against mounted units that we can get for 1 pop, but it costs 3 unhapppiness, so really quite limited amounts of drafting are possible if we are going to grow our cities and work those cottages to keep on teching. So we'll have a choice between letting Cuddle catch up in tech, or not drafting lots of rifles, instead building them along with everything else.
However, the MT option gives us this: An early and quick Taj/MoM combo for Mali to go beat the crap out of Inca and still fund/research, and a 100 hammer fastmover that flanks cats, trebs and cannon. Maya and Babylon, you just got a unit that is equal to Byzs' UU. England and Carthage, you just got a unit that will let you have odds on any knight force, and let you expand into Ottomans, and into Frances' land without riskiness because one stack can defend either side of your empires.
Do we need Rifling asap? I don't think we do. I think we want it as fast as we can reasonably get it after MT though, because that brings up the holy mother of god best unit in this era: the Cav. 120 hammers. Nothing gets odds on it until rifles (which I've already demonstrated will cripple CUDDLES tech to draft), it flanks everything until Arty, and has a 60% withdraw chance with F2. This is the unit that we want to be fielding, this is the uni that lets us take what we want, forking CUDDLE cities on the attack and covering as much ground as possible in our over-expanded empires.
The third option is that we aim for a Libbed Steel, which is doable if Maya wanted to bulb Chem, but Cannons aren't that useful for this reason:
They cost 100 hammers,and collateral astack, but the invaders cats are still there. The defender needs both the cannon to cripple the stack, and the units to finishit off. And as cannons are one movers, you need multiple stacks all over the place, and that is not cheap. We are still going to be building the 90 hammer knights, but on top of that we need to build 100 hammer cannons. it is actually better that we get cannons than rifles if you just consider the units, but Rifling is better because of Cavs. Cannons do let us attack though, as CUDDLE can't flank them away, nor can they collateral your stack while cannons defend...welcome back to the SP way of waging warfare. Problem is that C2 knights techincally have odds to survive, and Cataphracts generally win against Cannons, so Cannons are only really useful for Mali and Carthage if they were to push asap, and the rest of us were to sit back.
That is whyI prefer that we go for MT now and then research straight to Rifling afterwards (even using what little we can save up each turn to push Mali that little bit closer to finishing RP).
Now, what are Cuddle doing? What are they researching? They are getting Theo from Portugal, but that will be finished in the next few turns, and leaves open one very scary possibility for their 3 researchers in HRE, Portugal and Ottomans.
HRE: Gunpowder
Portugal: Theo then Nationalism
Ottomans: Education (this fits with their GNP imo)
What is the purpose of this? It gives them drafted muskets, units cheap enough to overwhelm us in numbers if they want to stack attack, or units powerful enough to just leave in a city to clean up against knights after one of us invades. They cat the knight stack (plus the junk underneath it) and flank with their knights, clean up with Muskets and other cheap junk. Meanwhile they then tech MT and get cuirs so that they can flank away cannons if we invade with those (using F2 cuirs).
So here is the plan again, tweaked:
Maya: Drama then Nationalism, overflow gold to Carthage
Carthage: Save gold, then Lib, save overflow
Babylon: Education, then Banking, overflow gold to Carthage
Mali: Constant funder to Babylon,
England: constant funder to Maya
Egypt: Constant funder to Maya
Once Banking is in, change to this:
Maya: Nationalism then Gunpowder, overflow gold to Carthage
Carthage: Lib, as fast as possible (won't be 100%, but doesn't have to be, 700 beakers less than Nat and has to take 1 turn longer)
Babylon: Funder to Mali
Mali: PP
England: constant funder to Maya
Egypt: Constant funder to Maya
It sounds like the most coherent plan with what to do with Liberalism, so I'm in favour, but what do you guys think?
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MoM/Taj plan in a nutshell would be to build MoM in Uberfish once we get Carthage's Marble (needs a couple of 3rd ring chops & to mine the plains hill) and to make sure our 1st GP is a GE then have him grab Taj (also in Uberfish). Try to avoid non Engineer wonders in Sirian to see whether we can get another GE for Statue.
Would be good to run the numbers for MoM to see whether this plan could work, or whether it's a pipe-dream on my part.
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Turn 115 (1 AD)
It looks like Swiss already played this turn. We got Feudalism, Guilds, and Engineering this turn.
I think it's better to get a Granary in Steel Wheels before the Mint. The Granary effectively halves the cost of whipping, while the Mint only gives a 25% boost to production. So I switched the production there. Next turn the second chop will be finished, which will finish the Granary.
Blake was set to build a Catapult, but we just whipped the Stable there so we could build mounted units. I switched production to a Horse Archer, and switched the city to work the newly completed farm instead of the Horses. This will let it grow this turn, and will also delay the production of the Horse Archer so that we can hook up Iron and have it upgraded to a Knight.
As to the possibility of building the MoM in Uberfish...
It costs 450 hammers, divided by 2.25 for the Marble and Mint bonus, and we end up needing 200 raw hammers. With 2 mines (1 plains, 1 grass) and the city tile, we'd get 8 raw hammers per turn. That would be 25 turns to build it! I think third ring forest chops give 24 hammers, so we could cut 9 turns off the build time that way. We can set up a double whip to overflow 36 hammers (or close), which would cut another 4 turns off. Conveniently, the Worker we are building will hit 22/60 hammers next turn, the perfect number for a max overflow double whip. So that means it would take us 12 turns to build the MoM. We might be able to cut that down a bit more by building a workshop or two, and/or by doing a second whip with overflow into the MoM.
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