[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[spacetyrantxenu]

T156 - I watched three football games today. The first left me sunburned (USF blown out by Miami), one left me entertained and happy (UGA beats LSU at the end of the game while no one could muster up a defense), and one left me sleepy (UF clobbered Kentucky even though the score doesn't look like it). So after the third game ended on a several hour delay via my DVR, it's time to play a turn of Civ when I'd much rather be sleeping. Oh, and write a turn report. Well....photos.

That's a big map and no zoom we have here. And my god at the signs I've posted everywhere, if only there were a UI button to hide them all (like maybe tie it in with CTRL+B!!!!).




Happy Face will shrink as it runs nothing but science specialists this turn. Swamp people will get its food box down to 0/22 and not starve. It will start starving next turn because our emperor is a cruel master. Mister Love gave up working a tasty 2/0/4 GA village tile in exchange for a citizen specialist this turn and will do the same the next turn. That will get Shwedagon Paya built in two turns, so we'll get to use it to swap to theocracy before the golden age ends in three turns. You know, I bet if I made plans I could make that kind of shit happen all the time, right? Worker movements are more or less all explained by those floating yellow billboards. Nothing to see here, move along.

Up north retep is chopping a forest outside his borders. He's either about to pop borders and grab the hammers, or about to settle a bad city and share food (and soak up GLH trade routes) or he's just chopping trees because they're there. If that's the case I'll get pissy about it and rage later. I am the Lorax, I just need a reason to kill you, etc.

It's late and I'm tired so I didn't bother to reset the screen resolution, so an annoyingly wide view of F1.




This should really be more exciting by now, right? Well...if Oxy shows his F1 screen that's where the fun has been for the last several hundred years. Units in queues, whipped out of queues, rinse, repeat. Oxy is the new me, only more committed to not dying, damn an economy. Anyway, as for our builds...slow going some places, but we'll be back on the whip soon enough.

Demographics:




Either retep or wetbandit are ahead of us in MFG. Considering Retep is in a golden age it's probably him. After the turn rolled our power dropped to 6th. I'll need to check who that is, I should be able to figure it out from graphs. Just a few more turns of good looking GNP, then it'll go back to being approximately dog shit. That's a technical term. Crop yield will drop quite noticeably for us next turn, too. Two turns from now the food graph is going to basically look like we've lost two large cities while Happy Face and Swamp People starve in GPPs for us. Let them eat cake!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Turn played.




We finish the Shwedagon Paya with exactly 450h while working the cottage. So, terrible citizen specialist not needed. Note the queued up 1t Jewish missionary. We'll need to keep these guys coming out of ML. I've sent a galley to retrieve this missionary and take it to our Moai city so we can get started on our nav1 galleys. We won't whip the Moai city, so best to get started on our navy now.




We actually want this to be the second GP we spawn, so we'll starve again this turn and then take the deer back from HF next turn. We'll leave caste, so we can continue working the engineer and two scientists. Keep hoping for an engineer, because this plan isn't 100% certain, given the mixed GP pool in Tyler.




I added an extra merchant this turn. Next turn put it back on the grass river farm so we won't starve until the GP spawns in 5t. We'll continue working 5 specialists here, with a -1 food deficit. I think we starve on the last turn.

To accomplish the swap out of caste while getting the two GP we need to fire another GA and get us to our war civics, we have to switch into pacifism (and slavery) next EoT. The alternative leaves us in caste and unable to whip anything. So, here's what we could do. Swap to pacifism and finish up our two GP builds by around T163. In the meantime, we set up unit whips and continue spreading Judaism, particularly out of ML. I'd prefer to save our unit whips for a tight 5-8 turn period where we can utilize Police State. Unfortunately, unless we swap to Police State next EoT, that means whipping during a golden age. But, I don't think we're ready to whip just yet. We've run our food down pretty low in several cities running so many specialists, so recovering from whips would be slow. We need a few turns to build our food back up and continue spreading our religion so we'll get that third promotion on horse units and the second promo (at 4/4 with CHM) in cities without barracks/stables. So, I suggest that starting next turn we start putting a few hammers into catapults, HAs, and galleys/triremes everywhere. We'll do a series of back-to-back-to-back double whips once we swap to Police State in all of our cities and whip out our army at a discount (PS) and with better promotions (Vassalage), and then swap back to Representation/Bureaucracy/Caste when we leave the GA. Or, stay in Slavery if it looks like the campaign will need more units quickly. This maximizes the promotions we can get on our units and minimizes the amount of time our economy will contract by being out of Bureaucracy/Representation. If I haven't stated it yet, I estimate we'll finish Guilds in 4-5 turns.

Thoughts? If you're on board with this, I'll try to get a more concrete plan for what to whip where in the next day or two, but in the meantime we have to spread Judaism aggressively.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Sounds like a good plan, make it happen!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

A total hand-off isn't going to do much for my civ burnout.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm not trying to bail out completely, I'm just tired of playing turns. I think it's kind of telling that I'm not at all excited about the upcoming phase of the game. All I see is that the turns will take me even longer to play. Getting to the 'phracture is supposed to be the fun part of Slowzantium and I just don't feel it.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Ok, I can play the war turns. I just make no guarantee about the quality of my play. I was looking forward to some time of relaxation before plunging back in. I'll grab today's turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Sorry I didn't have time this morning before work. I'll log in and look around when I get home tonight so don't end turn unless there's really nothing to discuss from this turn.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I have not ended turn yet. After getting in game and looking really closely at some micro, I determined that we can't give up Caste and still get the great person (merchant) out of Tyler before Happy Face, which would set us back a bit. Also, I decided that if we got a low odds scientist in Tyler, which we could do by switching out of Caste because we'd have to run an engineer, 2 merchants, and 2 scientists, we would be basically hosed on getting a GA anytime soon and would have to eat a turn of anarchy, which I didn't want to risk. So, I swapped to just Pacifism. I also did this:




Byzantium swaps to Pacifism, finishes Guilds. Huh?

Here are our builds prior to going over to wealth builds:




You may want to go back through the cities and manage the tile micro. I had everything set up to see if we could finish Guilds in a non-Caste configuration, then I had to log out and do some RL stuff. We're working some water tiles that would be better as merchants or scientists, especially with this last GA turn being in Pacifism, but I ran out of time. You can also move the scouting units around, I didn't move all of them. I did move the one in Sisubstan.




Eh, no big deal.




Don't run any specialists here until we pop the GP out of Tyler.




Starvation begins immediately. -2 pop is a small price to pay.



It feels like a waste to use our civic swap on the last turn of the GA on just Pacifism, but there you have it. After Guilds, we can either go for Literature and our Epics, or Banking. I suggest putting a grocer in ML next turn. We can then go for barracks/stable in ML, or even better, missionaries. This is pretty much the only place we can build them outside of OR. If we don't get barracks/stables in time, we'll at least get two promos everywhere from Theocracy and Vassalage.

Xenu and I discussed briefly in chat today a quick sketch of how to get out some units. I want to use Police State/Vassalage/Slavery/Theocracy, but for as few turns as possible because we're dead in the water without Representation and Bureaucracy. So, if I ever have time, I'll try to run a quick sim to see how many of what kind of units I can whip out in a 5t period. Unfortunately, it will probably be during the golden age, but I don't see a way to avoid that. Anyway, I'm going to spend the next few turns (after we kill the wealth builds) putting a few hammers into longbows, catapults, maces, and phracts. Then I'll see about doing back to back to back to back whips on them (owww) wherever we can. If we're lucky, we'll have enough overflow on the phracts at the end of the whipping spree to 1t one last phract. That would be -8pop, so obviously we can't do that more than a couple of places, but that's the extreme end of the scale.

Xenu, you like to kill beautiful things, right? Are you sure you don't want to be the one to whip this civ into the ground?

[spacetyrantxenu]

I do like whipping beautiful things but our empire is not beautiful. What's the point of beating something ugly further with the ugly stick?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Quick count: 129 pop. That's a lot of whipping. Get your whip hand ready.

Are you logging in to reconfigure stuff or do I have to face the wrath of wife and do it myself? I'm getting awfully henpecked here lately.