Astronaut without sin confounds press, invites trio to control civilization

[SevenSpirits]

Oh man I forgot to mention in the scenic tour that the citizens of Io are the only ones with running water; they should be grateful and really should not be complaining about our food rationing decisions all the time. You can't be great if you're too fat!

[SevenSpirits]

Huh, wonder what the lurker thread's going on about these days. This isn't one of those games where everyone else wants the game to end and we're just not noticing it, is it?

[zakalwe]

Everybody is waiting for you to concede.

[SevenSpirits]

Played t111, gonna report tomorrow. Quiet turn, chemistry in.

[SevenSpirits]

Right, Notre Dame is officially in. We also got 22 failgold for it.


The merchant made it safely to Lupin III and produced 1273 gold. Did you know that 37 is the 12th prime number, and 73 is the 21st prime number? Awesome huh? I know this because I've had some interesting luck in my life involving those numbers, and not because I'm some kind of math genius.

By the way, we have a small strike force moving into possition to capture this island. Hopefully we can catch both cities on a turn without new units.


Research stayed at 100%, and more famine was induced in various cities. We may be able to swing steel in 3 more turns - mouseover after ending turn shows it will take 2 now! (But of course we're switching out of specialist civics after just 1 turn, according to current plans which I think we'll stick with.) Last turn (100% on an unfinished Chemistry) was a new GNP high, by the way. I love hitting those outside of golden ages.

Also note Mackoti has started spending his 1000ish-gold stockpile. Gunpowder? Think he'll try to match our navy again? Well it's not going to work this time. Our ship production capabilities will be vastly superior to his with our civics, Kremlin, and Drydocks coming in soon.


Since Chemistry was to upgrade all our workshops at EOT, I had to do some careful city micro. Ganymede was producing more than enough hammers for a musket every turn and was almost at the overflow cap, so I hired a temporary merchant and queued up a settler for next turn to use up all the overflow. Yeah we'll start making more expensive cannons soon instead, but with police state we'll be 1-turning the cannons regardless, so the overflow would just go to waste.


I also microed Titan, firing a citizen because it has one workshop. As you can see below Kremlin was not delayed - due EOT112.


Also visible in the above shot - all the triremes that got upgraded to frigates when we finished Chemistry. Unlike all my previous games we have an opponent who doesn't skimp on navy, so we won't skimp either. Plan is to start a few privateers next turn, and whip them t113. Why privateers? Well it's nice to have a couple just for sentry, but more importantly, Mackoti gets first strike after the peace treaty ends. (I believe he can declare t115, and we t116. I'll have to confirm this mechanic though.) We can't have his galleons moving out of his culture directly to our cities that turn. So, we preempt him with some boats that can already sit on the key tiles inside his culture. t114 we make some frigates, so we can move them into key defensive tiles. After that we should have steel and can start whipping in 5xp cannons, and drafting 2xp muskets. It's about to get serious!

[SevenSpirits]

I'll save the fancy report for next turn. This turn consisted of cranking up the science even higher in anticipation of losing all our rep specialists next turn. I also queued up various frigates/privateers/trebuchets(pre-cannons) and for some cities made sure they could 2-whip them. (Whips being 40 or 47h per pop and privateers costing 53h, this was hard.)

Forces moved into position to hit Sian's island cities, but one of them has a fresh pike that I don't think he'll be able to pick up next turn, so we may wish to delay.

Mackoti got gunpowder and can now bulb Chemistry with his recent scientist, which I certainly expect him to do. Hence I dialed down the privateer count a bit, only starting four. There goes my dream of pillaging all his seafood again before he can reach naval parity. (We got 11 last time; he's fixed them all by now.)

Btw he's been building a lot of catapults. Good thing cannons are immune to collateral. :neenernee

[SevenSpirits]

Report later, but interesting foreign news now.

* Mackoti got Chemistry as expected. Seems it just took the scientist + overflow.
* Luddicator's now paying 50gpt to Mackoti. Why? Well looking at the gold totals and rates this turn and last reveals that it was almost certainly done in exchange for all of Mackoti's current reserves, 330 gold. I wonder what Luddicator is in such a hurry to tech? They can't really get anything that good for their next tech(s). Maybe Printing Press or Gunpowder?
* Sian got Gunpowder. Incredible how many players are going up the bottom part of the tree in this game and ignoring the top.

[Ichabod]

Those flying camera shots are really good, Seven. When I try to use it, my game just go crazy...

[Rowain]

Those flying camera shots are really good, Seven.

Seconded. Suddenly the game looks so real.

[SevenSpirits]

Cool, glad you like them. (Ichabod: you have to keep the mouse very still, only move it very slowly/carefully, and use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdown to move the viewpoint around.)

So, t113... we now have The Kremlin, an incredibly strong wonder.

Pictured: Saint Basil's Cathedral

... so of course we adopted some new civics:


I'm pretty sure no more aggressive set of civics exists.

This saved 30gpt, mostly due to Nationhood being free, but of course cost us the Bureaucracy commerce. Not as big a deal as it might be for others since we don't have an academy or Oxford. (Though it does have our only University, plus an Observatory.) The main cost was in no longer running dozens of representation-boosted scientists and merchants. As a result, Steel's ETA is next turn instead of this turn.

I whipped a bunch of stuff, including some long-wished-for infrastructure (granaries/lighthouses) in our island holdings, plus some boats.


As you can see we now have four privateers and four frigates. More frigates are imminent. I also drafted three muskets.

Amusingly, we spotted a mackoti galleon out in the western ocean. But he can't see us! (Unless he too has a sentry unit aboard. Or of course if it moves closer to us next turn, an action its current trajectory denies. Either way remember we have a peace treaty still.)



Demos:



Oh how far our GNP has fallen from over 1000 last turn.

You may also remember that a potential attack on Sian's island was alluded to. Well, that's off for the moment: he whipped another pike in each city. I think there's a good chance that next turn, two pikes will have boarded a galley and the third will be stranded in the middle of the island, without road access, so fingers crossed for that.