Turn Tracking Thread

[Sullla]

Turn 126 - 275AD

We finished the Great Lighthouse, and there's a new idiot city on our borders.



Here's another picture of the Apolyton/CivFr border region, which is crawling with units of all nationalities. At least we don't have to worry about barbs killing our scout with all these foreign units patrolling the area. CivFr is going to plant their own city somewhere close by this turn or next turn. I have no idea what the politics are like between these teams, but it certainly suggests that there are some tensions over here. Apolyton's city of Izmir is looking more and more like an indefensible idiot plant city.

Speaking of which...



Uh, this is not where I was expecting the Germans to put their city down. They manage to avoid getting any useful tiles in the first-ring, and they also placed it a mere 3 tiles away from Ditchdigger, in a completely indefensible spot. Even if they do get us to clear the jungle on the gems tile, how in the world will they ever get food to this city without being able to dejungle / farm the rice? And that's not even counting how far away this city is from their core, and the total lack of connecting roads. This is one of the more foolish city spots I've seen in some time, and it's like the third or fourth such example in this very game!

A lot of the other teams are just not very smart.

Fortunately, this city is placed quite nicely for our own team, when we remove ownership from the Germans in about two dozen turns. Our post-Worms additional filler city is designed to go W-NW of the rice tile above, where the city will grab the rice and sheep tile just visible at the top of the screenshot. The new idiot city's borders slot in perfectly with that location. More immediately, I plan to have us swap to a theatre in Ditchdigger next turn, and then double-whip it to completion on Turn 128 when the city hits size 4. We can then quickly grow back to size 4 and run double Artist specialists for a few turns, allowing us to reach the 100 culture border expansion by about Turn 135. With third-ring borders, we will hold control of the tile southeast of Wolfrathausen, which makes the city literally impossible to defend. We'll be able to capture the city on the very first turn we declare war. The Germans will pay huge distance maintenance costs for this utterly useless city, and just when it starts to become profitable, it will become ours. I'm very much looking forward to claiming that spot.



To the south, Horse Feathers will finish Heroic Epic next turn (HE in HF) and then begin churning out a bunch of military units. We need the war chariot you see above to serve as military police for one turn until the first catapult gets finished, then it will be able to move into the new Frozen Jungle for garrison duty. After the great lighthouse debate of Turn 125, Brick By Brick went over to Wealth and will remain there for the moment. It sounds like we have a consensus on growing the city to size 9, and then running a 9 -> 8 -> 9 draft cycle there down the road, without a lighthouse.

Oh, and we built something in the water outside Gourmet Menu:



Great Lighthouse did indeed finish on schedule, granting us 10 additional trade routes (20 commerce) for the moment, with our 5 coastal cities. That's roughly equivalent to three gems tiles, or just short of what Printing Press would give us at the moment. In other words, pretty considerable stuff. I much prefer having Great Lighthouse to have Colossus on this map, since we don't really want to work that many coastal tiles in most cases, and the Great Lighthouse benefit is passive, rather than active. We don't have to work any specific tiles, we simply get more commerce for free, including in any new coastal city before it builds anything. I believe that the other teams have seriously undervalued this wonder, and it was a total steal to land it so late. Just hope that the other teams are not smart enough to all cancel Open Borders with us en masse. But given how everyone keeps rolling over to sign NAPs with us and trade us marble, I kind of doubt that will happen.



In the eastern half of our territory, we're building lots of theatres at present. Mansa will finish its theatre normally, while Eastern Dealers, Starfall, and Forbidden Fruit will all whip theatres next turn (when we revolt back into Slavery). This will let us overflow into Globe Theatre on T128 in Starfall and begin the process of building that national wonder as well. FF will overflow into a missionary, as our three newest cities all lack Hinduism at the moment. Eastern Dealer will overflow into its library, which we need to start the National Epic. The plan there is to build some more pop, triple-whip a forge as soon as we have Metal Casting (T133-134ish), then overflow with marble into National Epic. It only takes about 7 turns to build, and should finish slightly after Turn 140. We'll have Moai, Heroic Epic, National Epic, and Globe Theatre all finished before Turn 150.



Here is another look at our trade route income with everyone else, cut and pasted to get everyone on one screen. We get a total of 92 commerce right now from foreign trade routes, absolutely insane. Why the hell are all these teams trading with such a runaway civ?! We also have plenty of room to spare on trade routes, as we're barely pulling anything from CFC or CivPlayers. We can still found lots more cities and have foreign trade routes to connect to. I still think that we should push for Open Borders with UniversCiv, if only so we have some more leeway for trade routes if other teams start canceling OB. And of course we'll lose our German trade routes when we declare war on them later. Would be nice to have another civ's 13 cities available if we need them.

With the civics, all teams other than the 3 hopelessly backwards musketeers are running Hereditary Rule, along with CFC using their Pyramids for Representation. Four of us have reached Bureaucracy, everyone else is in the default Legal civic. Slavery abounds, except for CFC's Caste System, which they have been running for some time now. I expect them to pop back into Slavery for a bit soon, there has to be some builds that need whipping. Nothing in the Economy column yet of course, and Apolyton/CivPlayers are the only ones in Organized Religion. We are the only team to have used Pacifism at all thus far in this game. We've played the religion game thus far much better than every other team, aside from CivPlayers with their own heavy monk strat. Of course, we've done basically everything else vastly better than CivPlayers.

Overview / tile micro:

Seven Tribes is out of improved tiles to grow onto, and so will prepare a settler for the furs/crabs coastal spot nearby in the deep south. I plan to build this for two turns, and then double whip (not triple whip) on the turn after the Golden Age ends. I don't really want to triple whip away three good tiles while we're in a Golden Age, and there's not a huge rush to get that spot a turn sooner.

We did produce a Great Scientist this turn in Eastern Dealers. I have us working 2 Scientists there because the GPP will not be wasted in our future National Epic city, and we may as well take advantage of Golden Age / Pacifism to get some more GPP. No more than two specialists though, so that next turn we can double whip the theatre and instantly regrow the same turn (size 8 -> 6 -> 7). We don't have enough food to do this if we run more specialists this turn. Workers are moving over to Eastern Dealers to mine the hills and get it ready for its National Epic build.

We can't run even 0% science on Philosophy or Paper tech without finishing them, so a turn of 0% science on Archery tech it is. We've stockpiled over 900 gold over the last few turns, and that along with the two Wealth builds in Focal Point and Brick By Brick should get us to Liberalism after four turns of 100% research. Apolyton ran another turn of 0% science themselves last turn, and presumably made no progress towards Education/Liberalism. Perfect! Five turns left to go, including the current turn.



Our trade route number went up quite a bit with the addition of Great Lighthouse routes. We're still almost last there, which is what always happens when you're a large civ. We get 92 commerce, but pay out 118 commerce, so we have a net of -26. Note that the 118 commerce is what all other teams combined get from us, and we have 6 trading partners, so we give out an average of 20 commerce per civ. That's not trivial, but we're obviously cleaning up enormously on our own end, making the Open Borders more than worthwhile.

Everything else is predictable Golden Age goodness. I'll be interested to see how the numbers look when we come out of the Golden Age and can make a more fair comparison. GNP is over 800 again at max research. We'll be taking over the #1 spot in Power over the next few turns, and my hope is that we'll remain permanently there for the rest of the game. We've got three strong production cities (Focal Point, Horse Feathers, Brick) and aside from needing forges/stables, they can pretty much go pure military for a very long time indeed.

I barely managed to get graphs back with UniversCiv this turn; EP spending remains divided between them and CivFr. We are slowly making progress toward getting CivFr's graphs. CivPlayers has 480 EP invested against us; expect them to try stealing techs once they get Alphabet. We'll build jails and security bureaus later on to counter. No point in worrying about them now, they are not too scary aside from all their espionage points.

Now that we have Great Lighthouse assured, I hope to work some more on sandboxing the upcoming turns. Let me know your suggestions and comments.

[Sullla]

Turn 127 - 300AD

Apolyton built University of Sankore and CFC discovered Alphabet tech. That's the main news from the turn.



Here is a picture of our scout about to enter Apolyton territory. Since they denied us a map trade, we're going to manually go through and reveal as much of their territory as possible. We do not have a "no scouting" clause in our Open Borders or anything like that. Until they say something, moving through their territory is fair game.

Konya sits somewhere around city #7 on the Apolyton list of founding, right in the middle. They have a granary and a courthouse inside, along with their religion. I find that to be a bit of an odd choice, going for courthouse as the second build after granary with a civ that's not Organized and doesn't have a courthouse UB. Hard to say if this is a good or bad decision without seeing more of the local terrain though, it could be a smart pick. I plan to move into the city tile next turn to get more information.



Down in the south, that barb axeman is causing some minor problems. I've moved our Heroic axeman Lew closer to help escort our upcoming settler to its destination. We can also move the war chariot inside Horse Feathers down here to assist if needed; that war chariot can move into Gourmet Menu next turn, and be down by Seven Tribes the turn after that. The plan is to double whip the settler next turn, after the Golden Age is over, and hopefully walk down to the tile north of the furs in safety. We'll play it by ear, but I think we have enough units between the scouting axe and a war chariot to cover this settler. No need to build additional war chariots as suggested before.



The Germans have moved a worker down to this area. I'm guessing that they plan to chop the plains forest for a terrace, then gift the worker to us and have us remove the jungle on their gems tile. Assuming that's the case, it will take 3 turns to chop down the forest, and then another 5 turns for the terrace to expand borders. We should be popping the 100 culture ring just about that same time in Ditchdigger, which will allow us to control that tile to the southeast of the idiot city indefinitely.

Workers should have a road connection between Ditchdigger and Seven Tribes completed in about five more turns. That will give us a bit more security against CivPlayers if they would ever try something.



WPC logged into the game and gifted us an archer while I was playing the turn. I guess that we'll use this guy for military police somewhere. Better than nothing!

This is the last turn of our Golden Age, and we revolted back into Slavery / Organized Religion as a result. Our costs went up significantly as a result of their "High" upkeep status, but of course we want the benefits of both civics. I did three whips after swapping, all of them for theatres:



Forbidden Fruit did a one pop whip for its theatre, with the overflow going into a missionary. We discussed this last turn, and I still believe that delaying the theatre at half-completed value didn't give us much of a benefit. We might as well finish the thing, make use of the whip overflow, reset the whip timer (there was no prior whip unhappiness in the city), and get started on Globe Theatre a turn sooner. Eastern Dealers did a very similar move, double whipping its theatre to completion. The overflow will almost but not quite complete its library. We'll finish that and then triple whip a forge in Eastern Dealers (once we have Metal Casting), using the overflow and three grassland hill mines to build National Epic.

The last theatre whip was inside Starfall:



Another two pop whip allows us to overflow into Globe Theatre next turn, and start the endless whip/draft cascade. Even though we starved this city down to 5 Food while in Caste Syste / Pacifism, Starfall will rebound extremely quickly with its +13 food surplus. Right now, we need to keep working the maximum allowed 2 Scientist specialists to finish that last Great Scientist. We get 12 GPP this turn from being in a Golden Age, then 6 GPP next turn, and then 6 GPP the final turn, producing the second Great Scientist on Turn 130, the exact turn that we lightbulb Education. As amazing as the timing works out, there was a fair bit of luck in there. (Of course, we could have starved the city further with more Scientists during the Golden Age if absolutely necessary.)

Overview / tile micro:

Adventure One swapped off its 98/100 settler and went back to building its temple for whip overflow purposes later. We also have a market at 149/150 production there. Most everything else is pretty standard. We fired all of the specialists outside of the remaining two Scientists at Starfall. Eastern Dealers immediately regrows one pop from its whip next turn, Forbidden Fruit regrows in 2t. Simple Life is going to double whip the worker next turn, with the overflow being enough to finish its library. I think that's about all that's going on with the tile micro this turn.

We've finally turned on research this turn, going 100% science into Archery tech. Obviously this will give us massive overflow, and we'll do the same thing on the next two turns with Philosophy and Paper techs. After the double Education lightbulb, the overflow will let us finish Liberalism at eot 130. Apolyton ran another turn of 0% science and is now up to 450 gold. That's definitely good news for us, as they are rapidly running out of time to grab Education and win the Liberalism race. Four more turns to go, including this one. (Before anyone raises the issue again, no, we're not saving a Great Scientist for Printing Press or whatever. We essentially have a guaranteed Liberalism here, which turns into a nearly guaranteed Taj Mahal. There is no reason to get greedy and potentially screw that up.)



Demos in Golden Age mode continue to be as expected. I'm looking forward to seeing where we stand when we come out of the GA next turn. We still have to keep running most of our espionage points against UniversCiv right now to keep their bar graphs. I'm very slowly making progress against CivFr, while still maintaining the charts with UniversCiv and their many rathauses.

CFC discovered Alphabet tech this turn, letting us see their techs. They basically have Alphabet and Metal Casting up on us, while we are up Iron Working and the whole Aesthetics line. Beaker count is about even for now, at least until we claim 11,000 beakers in the next five turns. Special congratulations to kjn for correctly predicting every single CFC tech.

Apolyton built University of Sankore, which I think was a good thing for us. It ensures a split of the monk wonders, with Sankore in the hands of Apolyton and Apostolic Palace controlled by CivPlayers. Now no one gets super-temples, just middling good ones for two different civs. If Apolyton wants to research Divine Right and build Spiral Minaret as well, they can be my guest. I don't think that Sankore alone makes temples/monasteries particularly useful builds. I actually hope that Apolyton starts building a bunch of them rather than more useful stuff.

We should be done with the turn now. I plan to use this evening for more planning work to push us forward up to Liberalism. Everything looking solid as usual.

[Sullla]

Turn 128 - 325AD

Well, the Golden Age is finally over. But we're still in very good shape.



First of all, I had this marble offer from the German team when I logged in. Very nice. This should clear our major obstacle to the Taj Mahal. Since this was just under discussion in the thread, I'll chime in with my thoughts on the building of the wonder. I think that we should whip the temple and settler as planned, but refrain from the market whip on T130. I don't think that it will be necessary, and I would prefer to save the extra pop point. That's 10 additional turns of working a grassland town in our capital, not at all trivial from a commerce perspective, and then we have one fewer pop point to grow back afterwards as well.

For comparison purposes, the wonder finishes eot 138 if we whip that market, and finishes eot 140 if we don't. My personal feeling is that either date should be extreme safe for a Taj Mahal build; we are on Turn 128 right now, and no one has researched a single Renaissance tech as yet. Apolyton would have to research all of Nationalism tech (3200 beakers) and then build the wonder, without marble, all before the end of T140. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. CivFr has an even more unlikely situation, needing Philosophy and Nationalism techs, in addition to picking up Civil Service at some point and burning a turn of anarchy revolting into Bureaucracy. I mean, sure it's possible, but there is a point at which we start to veer off into paranoia. Barring a Great Engineer popping up somewhere, I'm struggling to see how someone is going to out-build us to this 700 shield wonder when we have the tech much earlier than everyone else and have marble to help build it.

Ultimately up to the team, of course, and we don't have to make a decision for another two turns.



We uncovered a little bit more of Apolyton territory with our scout. More importantly, there is an Apolyton settler (unguarded!) on the tile southwest of the UniversCiv warrior. They're probably heading for one of the desert hill tiles next to the corn. Definitely looks like Apolyton and CivFr are snapping up the final uncontested land along their borders. Maybe thing will get more interesting after that takes place, although their teams seem to be pretty solid allies right now.



We've found the borders of the last remaining German city up to the north. Our Woodsman II axe will check it out next turn. The Germans also gifted us a worker this turn, which we have promised to go and chop the jungle on their gems resource. I thought that they would chop the plains forest tile first, but nope, another worker is coming over to do that. What a sad city pre-borders pop. I'll go send this worker to their gems tile next turn, and if there's a barb sitting outside the German borders to kill the worker... well gee, what a sad event that would be.

Under the interface, Ditchdigger whipped its theatre and will start pushing on the German idiot city. We'll be able to run two Artist specialists in a few turns and pop the 100 culture borders, ensuring our control of the tile southeast of the German city. Their location is completely indefensible against attack.



Fortunately the barb axeman in the south moved away from our borders. Heroic axeman Lew should be able to move next to the thing and induce a suicide attack. Seven Tribes was double whipped for its settler this turn, and we should found the furs/crabs city on T131 if all goes according to plan. That CivPlayers chariot is a bit irritating, hopefully it will keep moving out of the way. I could not cover the two workers on the horses tile with a unit, we'll just have to trust their word on our current NAP. I've brought down a war chariot from the north, currently inside Gourmet Menu, which can help cover workers/settler as needed when they leave our borders.



Here's the core of our territory coming out of the Golden Age. Horse Feathers will go ahead and keep building catapults until we discover Metal Casting. You can never build enough cats in Civ4. I also have the city on a high growth configuration at +6 food/turn; since we don't have any unit all that pressing to build, we may as well take advantage of this time to try and reach a higher size. I think the city caps out at about size 14, where it produces 27 base / 61 total (Heroic Epic + forge) production. 1t elephants and 1.5t knights? Yes please.

Mansa's Muse and Forbidden Fruit have overflowed into Hindu missionaries. These builds can be changed if desired, but I felt that they were a nice placeholder while we are waiting on forges. Our three newest cities all lack religion right now, and we'll be planting two more cities in the near future. Missionaries will not be a waste. Mansa is currently up to +26 gold/turn from the shrine (!!!), the result of another free spread of religion somewhere out in the fog. Just crazy how valuable that shrine has been, and we still get to add grocer/bank/Wall Street later on. We remain the only team in the game with a shrine.



Further east, Simple Life double whipped its worker, and the overflow will finish its library next turn. Eastern Dealers is growing like a weed now that it doesn't have to run those specialists. Workers will have all of the grassland hill mines up shortly, and then we can get started on National Epic, with a forge whip in there at some point. As for Starfall:



We put the first turn of whip overflow into Globe Theatre as planned. Everything that you see there is from overflow; we only get 1 production naturally this turn. Next turn we'll swap back to galley and double-whip that, again overflowing into Globe, and keep doing that until it finishes. The massive food surplus and lack of caring about happiness penalties effectively lets us break the game here and abuse Civ4's mechanics. Note also the two Scientist specialists: almost done with that Great Person. He'll arrive right on time on T130.

Overview / tile micro:

[IMG]

I tested our break-even research rate outside of Golden Age mode, and it turns out to be roughly 300 base / 360 modified beakers per turn. That's a very solid place to be at this stage of the game, and we can claim medieval techs at a nice rate of 3-5 turns each. We caught an amusing break when CivFanatics used their Great Scientist to research Philosophy tech one turn before we finished our own research. Thanks, guys! In truth though the effect is minimal, because we've already knocked out 99% of the beakers, but I did find it amusing. At least they didn't get any known tech bonus from us. Onward to Paper and then Education/Liberalism.

Apolyton finally looks to have turned on their research, but it's probably too late now. Three more turns to go including this current turn (eot 130).



Demos are still pleasantly strong out of Golden Age mode. The GNP is hard to read, since Philosophy gets so many pre-requisites, but we are still first there for the moment. I was delighted to find that we still had a lead in Production as well outside of Golden Age, and by quite a good margin. We will overtake the top spot in Soldiers next turn in all likelihood; we were first before I whipped away some of our population this turn. We are second in the game's geometric Population stat only because CivFr has their crazy size 17 (!) capital.

Nothing of note in terms of espionage points. Still keeping graphs with UniversCiv and slowly getting some EP with CivFr. Fire away with your thoughts and comments.

[Sullla]

Turn 129 - 350AD

One foreign missionary shows up and everyone goes crazy.



Our scout in Apolyton territory found this city, which I believe was the fourth one they planted. It has a lot of infrastructure inside: granary, library, courthouse, forge, hamman, temple. However, as kjn pointed out earlier, it's not working the horses tile for some reason. Not enough food, perhaps? This appears to be along the northern border of Apolyton territory (note the tundra and lack of road heading north), so we'll continue east and see what else turns up next.



We had a request to show the marble area along the WPC/German border, and here it is as our chariot moved past. These guys sent 6 workers over to the marble to get it improved quickly, heh. The German team also still seems to have their military concentrated in the east along the WPC border, which would be really nice for us if it's still true in 30 turns.



Our scouting axeman also found the last German city here in the northwest part of their territory. It's on top of a wines resource and has a terrace alone for its city infrastructure. More importantly, check out the borders to the north: there's an Apolyton city right on top of this one! Apolyton looks to be much closer than we originally thought. We'll have to make sure to get an NAP extension with them in place before committing to war with the Germans. (We have an NAP deal to Turn 150 with Apolyton at present, which neither team thought would be more than a formality.) More info should become apparent as the axe continues further north to keep scouting.



And here is the big controversy from the turn. CivPlayers moved a Buddhist missionary up next to our borders when they played their turn. They also generated a Great Prophet this turn, who will almost certainly be creating the Buddhist shrine next turn or the turn after. It certainly looks like they plan on moving into our territory next turn and trying to spread religion in Ditchdigger. This is an unacceptable move for our team, largely due to the Apostolic Palace that CivPlayers built.

I genuinely would not care about another team spreading religion, but the AP religion is a "poison pill" element that can cause all sorts of problems for our team. The biggest one is the AP diplo victory; although unlikely, CivPlayers has a slim possibility of winning a total cheese victory if they spread religion to every team and get some support from someone else. We have to prevent that from happening, and the only real defense would be spreading Buddhism to many of our other core cities, which we do not want to do either. This would give CivPlayers more shrine income, make it easier for them to spy on us, and make it easier for them to steal technologies with their massive stack of EPs. As I said a minute ago, the AP religion is a total poison pill. We do not want it anywhere in our territory if we can avoid it. We need to spread Hinduism into our religion-free cities quickly and get into Theocracy at the end of our Taj Mahal Golden Age. Do not undestimate just how much of a pain the AP religion can be.

We have already sent off a polite but firm diplo message telling CivPlayers not to spread religion in our territory. If they do not reply, I will have to cancel the Open Borders deal at the end of this current turn. Sorry, but there's not much of a choice. The AP religion is not something we want in our empire, nor do we want CivPlayers to start getting ideas about stealing techs from us with the state religion discount in place. We can always resign Open Borders again once they understand that we won't be permitting missionaries. Remember, it's our territory and our cities. We're within our rights to tell other teams that they can't send missionaries around. Our NAP deal with CivPlayers is also not tied to our Open Borders deal in any way, so please keep that in mind. If they would flip out and get angry, they can't declare war until Turn 170, by which time we should have finished munching on the Germans and be enormously far ahead of them. They're welcome to come bring it on at that point, when we'll have knights/cuirassiers/cavs everywhere and a huge army of drafted maces/muskets/rifles.

Unfortunately, CivPlayers has a unit causing more headaches in the south:



This scouting chariot of theirs is sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's right where we are trying to move some workers and a settler in preparation for our furs/crabs city. The barb axe is no problem; I will move up our own Heroic axeman Lew as arrowed, and we will likely induce a suicide attack between turns. If the barb axe would move north instead onto the flat ground, then our war chariot coming down from the north will be able to whack it on any possible place where it can move. And if it moves south, then it's out of the way for our settler to move up.

The plan for the workers this turn is to move onto the tile where the CivPlayers chariot is sitting and road the tile. Our settler meanwhile moves onto the tile where the war chariot is sitting, and then moves SE-S-S next turn onto the city founding spot, north of the furs. I have not moved any of the units in this area yet this turn (aside from the war chariot), waiting for the CivPlayers chariot to move wherever it's going. If it doesn't move, I will scumbag the turn by double-moving CivPlayers and race our settler and workers past them along the turn roll window. I'm not too proud to abuse clock mechanics if we absolutely need them.

Depending on what the CivPlayers chariot does, I can also move up the spear in Seven Tribes, which has enough happiness to avoid a military police unit. Despite the sentry promotion, CivPlayers cannot see into Seven Tribes or French Riviera (the latter city's visibility is blocked by the forest tile) so they have no idea how few units are down here. I expect them to move off to the east without further issue. Hopefully.

One last thing for this picture: I put the overflow in Seven Tribes into a Hindu missionary while awaiting Metal Casting tech and forges. This can be changed if desired. I didn't see anything else too compelling (market/courthouse too expensive, barracks not useful) in light of the fact that our next big whip will surely be a forge here. Let me know what you think.



Here is our core territory, not anything too terribly important going on at the moment. We could potentially cancel those Wealth builds, I guess, but I wanted to err on the side of caution in our Liberalism pursuit. I don't think there's anything too important to build in either Focal Point or Brick By Brick right now either, just catapults. Horse Feathers is trying to get up to size 14, where we'll have it capped for quite some time. We've already finished two catapults and are working on the third one there. Once it grows a couple more sizes, we can easily do 1t catapults there, or more likely elephants and then knights.



The capital was whipped this turn in accordance with the Taj Mahal plan, funneling more overflow into this otherwise fairly useless Hindu temple. I asked everyone last turn, and you all seemed to want to whip the market next turn as well, so I will go ahead and do so. We are on track for a Taj finishing date at the end of turn 138 with this whip, the market whip, and the settler whip a bit later on.

Side note: we might want to try and set things up so that we have Machinery and Engineering techs done or nearly done when that Golden Age begins. It would be the perfect time to build Notre Dame here in the capital, while we have Golden Age production along with Bureaucracy and Organized Religion (we are probably dropping both for Nationhood and Theocracy around T145 when the Golden Age ends). Alternately, we could regrow the capital and use the Golden Age to build its forge and university, then do Notre Dame elsewhere, in Focal Point or something. Let me know your thoughts on this. Notre Dame (+2 happiness all cities) is extremely important to control on this map, it's the last crucial wonder until we hit Kremlin and Statue of Liberty another era down the road.



I forgot to take the overview picture of the turn, I'll see if I can do so later today. We're finishing Paper research this turn with absolutely massive overflow (well over 1000 beakers), and should be in perfect position to take Liberalism at the end of next turn. No one else even has Education as yet, so we look to be very safe indeed. I really, really wish that I could read some of the other team's forums when they see what happens. In fact, I'm planning on double-bulbing Education at the end of next turn just to give them even more of a surprise. We're going to get a humongous influx of score points from Education/Liberalism/Nationalism hitting all at the same time, so sign any last-minute diplo arrangements now before we place an even bigger target on our backs.

I am rather impressed that another team managed to top us in GNP for the turn, even if it is someone likely getting double pre-reqs on a tech. Good reason not to get complacent in this game, even as well as we are doing. We still retain the top spots in Food and Production, and took over the Power lead as well this turn. Hopefully we'll be able to keep it.

We still have another full day before we have to end our turn, and I'm hoping some of these concerns with CivPlayers will be straightened out by then.

[Sullla]

Turn 130 - 375AD

The Liberalism clock is down to its final turn... and none of the other teams appear to know what we're doing as yet.



We spotted two different Apolyton cities this turn, Edirne and Aurora. As kjn has already pointed out in this thread, Aurora was Apolyton's second city and has a ton of infrastructure inside, including an Academy. The presence of the gold resource indicates that this is their version of Mansa's Muse. It's a very nice city, and the home of their own self-founded religion. This would be a strong location to control if by some random chance we could ever get up here. Apolyton's capital should be located somewhere fairly close by.



This is the other side of Apolyton's territory, on the border with the Germans. We are going to have to make sure we have a new NAP in place with Apolyton before we go to war with the Germans; we can try to renegotiate in about 10 more turns. I suspect that they will foolishly sign another extention just like every other team.

Anyway, we now have visibility on every German city. Once we finish defogging that northwest corner, I'll recall the war chariot and use him for military police duty. We are actually pretty solid on military police units right now, despite a lot of shuffling around in recent turns.



I still can't decide if this land connects over to CFC down here in the deep south. I'm kind of hoping that it does not, as our galley won't have far to travel if it does. One way or another, we should know in the next few turns. Even if this is a closed sea, we can always build a fort down here and gain access to the polar ocean that way.



This is the south after moving our workers and settler at the start of the turn. The barb axe suicided against Lew (who would have about 13 XP now if it weren't for the experience cap against barbs), he moved to cover the settler, and then the war chariot protected our two roading workers. We'll found the city on this spot next turn, so feel free to go ahead and suggest names. Workers will improve the furs first, and then probably chop a forest for the work boat (we can't work the crabs until borders expand anyway). The Seven Tribes missionary will convert this city to help with that.



In the north, we'll have a road completed through this jungle next turn. There's been a lot of jungle clearing taking place, and this region is very slowly starting to become productive. I'm planning to whip the granary in Frozen Jungle this turn; it just grew to size 2, there are no other tiles to work beyond the rice currently, and we might as well get that food box filled up right away. I actually already did the whip in the sandbox, but I figured it would run it past this team before taking the action in-game. Seems pretty straightforward to me. We'll have some more jungle cleared by the time the city regrows to size 2.

Focal Point and Brick By Brick can finally stop building Wealth now; I wanted to make sure that we got to Liberalism safely before putting them back on builds. They should both be doing military for now. My suggestion would be for both to work on catapults, since we'll need plenty of them later on and I want to be building elephants/knights once we have the tech for them. War chariots are also an option, but again, I think we're OK for now on military police units, and we are definitely going to need a bunch of catapults as always. How about more 1t war chariots in the Heroic Epic city, and catapults in Focal Point/Brick? What does everyone think?

In the capital:



Everyone wanted to whip the market, so I have gone ahead and done so. There is your perfect 300/150 production overflow into Taj Mahal, the maximum allowed for a market. Credit to novice for the micromanagement. Note however that we've been forced to drop some cottage tiles in the process, and we'll be whipping off another pop point when we overflow from that settler in a couple of turns. It's probably worthwhile to lock down Taj Mahal and take no chances, I just hate whipping off those mature cottages.



Over in the east, we finished a library with whip overflow in Simple Life last turn. I have it set to a market for lack of too much else right now. We actually want a forge in the city next, but we can't build that yet, and the overflow was minimal enough that it didn't seem worthwhile to build Wealth. (Only 7 production overflow.) I preferred market over courthouse because Simple Life is such a heavy commerce city. These locations are mostly going to go forge -> market in the upcoming turns, followed by university (?) Well, we can use the Golden Age to get a lot of that construction done.



Eastern Dealers is working towards National Epic right now. I had thought to swap to forge and triple-whip it when we discover Metal Casting, but I've heard calls to grow this city to size 12 or 13 and then run a whole bunch of specialists during the next Golden Age, which does seem like a good plan. If we want to do that, then we can't slip in a forge whip. There are four workers over here in the process of mining the remaining two grassland hill tiles to help knock out National Epic quickly. I don't think we can have it done by the eot 138 when we kick off the next Golden Age with Taj, but we'll see what we can do in that direction. This is one city I hope to spend some more time playing around with.

Overview:

Apologies, I have to stop doing the tile micro each turn. We have too many tiles (well over 100) and it's taking too much time to draw them all in. I was starting to dread creating that image, and that feels like a sign to stop doing it.

I have not selected a tech or burned our Great Scientists on our Education lightbulb yet. I will do so before I go to bed tonight, and post again in this thread. I want our Liberalism play to be as much of a surprise as possible to the teams that can view our research (CivPlayers/Apolyton). I want to read those "WTF HAX!?!" messages in their forums after this game is over. But Liberalism is quite safely ours now, Apolyton still does not have Education tech yet, and no one else is even close. Education/Liberalism/Nationalism all at eot 130.



Demos with no tech selected and thus no GNP pre-requisite bonus of any kind. CFC's ranking in GNP fell quite a bit last turn when they revolted from Caste System back to Slavery. They have obviously been running a lot of Representation Scientists; this is what explains their performance on the Ceiliazul graph. And yes, CFC has now emerged as the clear second-place team. Their Pyramids play looks to have been a strong move. CivFr still has a lot of highly useful wonders, but they have not been developing as well as I was expecting. Not exactly sure why that is.

We are still first by wide margins in Food, Production, Land Area, etc. Note that we are quietly creeping out to a bit of a lead in Power as well, now that Heroic Epic is done and we've begun our military buildup. As I've said before, one of my minor goals is the hope that we'll be first in Power ranking for the rest of the game from this point on. We are always going to have a massive target on our back, and we want to discourage aggression by having tons of units. In other words, the opposite of what Parkin did in the Pitboss #4 game.

Nothing of note to speak of in the Espionage department. We have graphs on CFC, Germans, WPC, Spanish, and UniversCiv. Slowly climbing in EP with CivFr, we need maybe 5 more turns to get their graphs. Absolutely no prayer in the world of ever getting Apolyton or CivPlayers graphs.

CivPlayers moved their missionary away from our borders, and it seems that the little controversy with them has dried up. Let's respond to their diplo message, and I will re-offer them Open Borders tonight.

[Sullla]

Turn 131 - 400AD

Liberalism is ours! Now the race is on for Taj Mahal.



As posted earlier, we did land Liberalism as we expected. Congrats to everyone who helped on a job well done. We cannot rest on our laurels, however, because the race for Taj Mahal has immediately begun. The surprise of the turn was CFC discovering Nationalism on the same turn that we slingshotted it with Liberalism. We will now be racing them to the free Golden Age. More on this in a minute.



Scouting units revealed two more Apolyton cities this turn; we now have vision on about half of them. Like all of the other Apolyton cities, they have quite a bit of infrastructure, with forges and libraries and courthouses and such. This overview shot gives a pretty good view of Apolyton's territory. They are not really that far away, and we'll need to make sure that we have an extended NAP in place with them before going to war with the Germans. Apolyton does seem to be pretty squeezed on territory, and I suspect that they are more or less out of room for more cities. If they can ever get some more population to go along with their infrastrucutre and teching, they could be dangerous. But their biggest weakness is that they just don't have that much in the way of population.



CivPlayers has founded a city on the northwest coast by the spices. This jungle region is rapidly disappearing as it gets claimed by all of the other powers in the area. I have heard some suggestions about trying to settle at the sugars, and while those resources would be nice, I think that would be stretching ourselves too thin. A city placed over there would be extremely difficult to defend, and we could basically kiss goodbye to any prospect of future relations with CivPlayers. I'm worried enough about having to defend Brick and Ditchdigger if we get into a war over here. Extending our borders even further west right now doesn't seem like a good idea to me. You guys can feel free to chime in with your thoughts, I just think that we're going to have enough on our hands when we go to war with the Germans.



This is what we've managed to explore in the southern reaches of CFC territory recently. Does that land connect down there? Maybe? We should know soon enough. In the event that it does, we can likely use our galley to found a city in a spot of our choosing down there to serve as a border fortress against CFC. They have largely ignored the south.

Note that CFC has Fast Workers chopping tundra forests in the middle of nowhere. This looks like a sure sign to me that they are making a play for Taj Mahal in their capital of Indira. And... guess what? When I highlight the marble near CFC's territory, it no longer says "requires quarry". That means that someone has connected that marble, even if I have not seen the resource in CFC's diplo screen just yet. We have to assume that they will have marble connected and will use it for their forest chops and Taj build.

Now the good news is that they still don't have much of a chance to build this thing quickly. Third and fourth ring chops don't provide that much in the way of production, and CFC's capital is heavily configred for commerce, much like our own. I counted up their tiles and got 17 shields/turn base if they work for maximum production there. CFC does not have a forge in the capital, and even with Bureaucracy, marble, and Organized Religion civic, that only gets them to 46 shields/turn. I think that we should beat them to Taj even assuming that they connect marble this turn or next turn. However, we need to start tracking production in CFC's cities. We need to check all the cities at first until we identify which one is building Taj, then keep close tracks on that one city each turn. I'll see what I can do about this, but if someone wants to help it would certainly be apprecitated.



Elsewhere, here is the deep south with our new city founded, Let It Snow. I have it going work boat -> granary with the benefit of a forest chop, which seemed to be the better order. If someone wants to do a more formal sim on those two builds, be my guest. We are hampered here until the borders pop and open up the crabs + cows tiles, fortunately a missionary will shortly be down here from Seven Tribes. Our war chariot will finally move off to explore that southwest darkness and see if there's anything worth settling in the area. The CivPlayers chariot scampered over to the east somewhere. Amusingly enough, they will have to sign Open Borders with us in order to get that unit back home. We reoffered them but their team did not accept so far.



Here's our core territory. The road through the jungle to Ditchdigger has now been completed, and that does a lot to make our cities in the west safer. Once we have Engineering tech, mounted units will be able to move from Adventure One to Brick in two turns. At some point, it might be worth getting a road around the southern edge of the lake as well, nearly all of which is controlled by our culture.

Anyway, Frozen Jungle overflowed from its granary whip and I stuck it onto a barracks. We are planning to use this as a mass workshop production location, and barracks felt more useful than any of the other options. Feel free to suggest other builds. Horse Feathers can build a 1t catapult this turn, which makes that build fairly easy to choose. In the capital, we overflowed into Taj Mahal:



Thanks to the extended planning done by novice, we get to start with the wonder more than 1/3 completed. Now I'm really glad that everyone insisted on pushing Taj so hard even when it didn't seem like there would be any competition. Good call there.

We are planned to swap to settler next turn and then whip it; the overflow will accelerate our Taj build and have the wonder complete eot 138. We can speed up the wonder a turn further by chopping the deer forest tile and funneling that into Taj. Obviously this costs us 1 production per turn for the rest of the game on that tile, but that's a trivial issue compared to the output of a free Golden Age. I plan to have a worker on that tile chopping in a few turns, and we can decide whether to finish the chop or not when we reach that point. So it looks like we'll be finishing here at the end of turn 137 if we chop that deer resource. That's 6 total turns including this one. For this early in the game, that's a pretty good completion rate. I'll post the current sandbox file later if anyone wants to play around with this and try to shave another turn off. I couldn't find a way to do that without whipping the wonder directly, which we probably want to avoid given the massive penalty.



In the east, Mansa overflows into a university while awaiting Metal Casting and forges. Eastern Dealers whipped its nearly completed library, and will overflow some 70 production into National Epic next turn. That was an excellent suggestion from last turn.

Starfall wants to whip a building of some kind next turn to overflow into Globe while awaiting the chance to whip a forge. I selected a monastery largely for selfish reasons; this is basically a "free" building here, and we can get extra culture to push on that silly CFC city. That said, the monastery doesn't really do all that much for us, and we can just as easily whip a barracks here instead. I was planning to go monastery -> forge -> barracks, but we can go barracks -> forge -> units instead. If this is just me loving the cultural push too much, let me know, and we can go with the barracks instead. We are about 1/4 of the way done with the Globe already from whip overflowing.

Overview:

We overflowed about 50 beakers from Liberalism into Metal Casting. I've set us to 0% research for the turn; we'll be able to go 100% rate next turn and almost (but not quite) finish the tech. We can then finish Metal Casting at 10% or 20% research the following turn, at eot 133. Although we can probably finish Metal Casting at the end of next turn by squeezing out extra beakers, it didn't feel worthwhile to me. End of turn 133 should be fine.

Without the Wealth builds and with our capital not working some of its cottages, our break-even rate is currently about 45% science, at about 260 beakers/turn. This will recover when we stop working all production tiles at the capital, hopefully after landing Taj.



We fall all the way to 5th in GNP at 0% gold for the turn, although a lot of teams are running unsustainable deficits right now. Few teams have much gold, and they'll have to build up their treasuries again. Kjn believes that CFC has been running massive Wealth builds and Representation Scientists in recent turns to reach Nationalism so fast, which would make sense given their lack of recent cities or new infrastructure builds. At 100% science, we are still #1 in GNP right now. Everything else is about the same as before.

There are some important strategic planning discussions to take place; I will be out for a while today, then try to post on that later tonight.

[Sullla]

Turn 132 - 425AD

You guys do know that instead of talking in circles for hours, anyone could have logged into the game and figured out how much production was sitting in the box for CFC's Taj Mahal build, right? As it turns out, everyone was looking in the wrong place...



We'll get to everything Taj related in a minute. Here are two more of Apolyton's cities, their capital of Aurora and the city of, err, Apolyton. Not at all confusing. It seems a bit silly that they would deny us a map trade and then calmly let a scout walk through and reveal all their cities, but hey, works for us. I'm not complaining. We've got about half of their territory uncovered now, and the scout continues to make progress.



We have just about all of German territory scouted out now, and I'll be returning that war chariot to home soonish to avoid arousing more German suspicion. The Woodsman II axe will poke around the jungles to the south and see if he can reveal the new CivPlayers city. We've discovered most of what we can in this part of the world.



In the deep south, our war chariot found something potentially useful, a tundra deer resource off to the west. That will make a city of some kind over there probably worth founding eventually. We might even send the next settler over there if we turn up another resource, it wouldn't be too hard to reach or defend. The galley and another war chariot should be able to reveal the last corner over there in the southeast. Remember that we're finishing a settler in the capital this turn - where are we sending this one again? Don't get too caught up in Taj machinations and forget about that.

I realize that I accidentally shrunk this picture down in size twice instead of once - sorry! Too much work to go and fix it now.



OK, I figured that with another war chariot and the galley poking around on the other side of this body of water, this war chariot would be better used scouting around Indira to get a better view of the CFC capital. While we can track what infrastructure is in the city itself, our map vision of the surrounding tiles is outdated. Even if it's a minor advantage, I figure we might as well move the war chariot through and make sure we make no mistakes on our Taj build.

After I moved all of our units, I went ahead and ran the numbers for production tracking in all of CFC's cities. Well, their capital doesn't pose much of a threat for the wonder. They just finished a forge last turn, and they currently have 68 production sitting in the capital's box from overflow. We have 291 production inside our capital, and another settler whip adding more there this turn. Even with third or fourth ring forest chops, CFC isn't beating us to the wonder in their capital of Indira. I mean, we'll keep tracking the production, but it's not happening.

Unfortunately, they aren't building the wonder in their capital. They're building it in the city of Lakshmi, which has 352 shields in the box right now.

Alright, now that's the bad news. Before anyone goes and loses their head, this isn't necessarily the end of the world. I'm pretty sure that CFC has already burned production overflow from a forge and the remaining forests around Lakshmi to get so much production so quickly in that city. The scouting war chariot will be over there in two turns to check for sure. The good news is that Lakshmi is only size 8. It can only whip 4 population points towards Taj, not the 8 pop that the capital could potentially play around with. Each whip produces 30 x 2.5 production in Lakshmi, due to marble/forge/Organized Religion, so each whip is worth 75 shields. Normally 4 pop would get you 300 production, but there's a halving penalty for wonders, which means that they can potentially whip their 4 pop for 150 shields worth of production. In other words, Lakshmi needs to get over 550 shields to be able to whip. That's still another 200 shields, and even with all those bonuses that won't be cheap.

What kind of production are we looking at in Lakshmi? Well, they will probably be running a food deficit and working the 6 hill tiles. I don't think they can get much more than that; even if they work the corn and floodplains tiles, that still leaves them at a sizable food deficit (at least -4 food if not -5 food). Anyway, working the 6 hills grants them 21 production (with center tile) which becomes 52 production after all the modifiers. They'll still require 4 more turns of production before they can whip the wonder to completion. That would be as follows:

T132 352 shields
T133 404 shields
T134 456 shields
T135 508 shields
T136 560 shields -> whip to completion

However, we can 6-pop whip the wonder to completion at eot 134, or 4-pop whip the wonder to completion at eot 135. In either case, we still finish a turn ahead. That's all assuming that there are no more forest chops going into Lakshmi; if there are, then we are probably hosed. Well, that's why we're sending a unit over there to scout and see if there are any forests remaining. Watching to see what production Lakshmi has in the box next turn will be critical.

Here's our capital:



I will requote notice's Taj Mahal plan again here for reference:

Here are the facts about our Taj Mahal build:

* On t132, we whip the settler. We can work a farm over a plains cottage this turn for +1 hammers towards TM.
* On t133 we resume the TM build and we need 4 food to grow back to size 12. We can either work a plains cottage for 20hpt and 2fpt, growing back in 2t, or we can work a farm for 19hpt and 4fpt, growing in 1.
* If we just keep slowbuilding the TM it completes eot137.
* We can chop the deer on t136 to complete the TM eot136. So whipping on t136 doesn't make sense.
* If we grow back to size 12 eot133 by working the farm, we can 6-whip the TM on t134 to finish it eot134.
* On t135 we can 4-whip the TM to finish eot135.

So we should do the following, to have emergency options for completing TM on both eot134, eot135, and eot136, with eot137 as the scheduled non-emergency completion date.

t132: Whip the settler, work the farm over a plains cottage.
t133: Grow back to size 12 by working a farm over a plains cottage.
t134: Work max hammers (21hpt). 6-whip if necessary.
t135: Work max hammers (21hpt). 4-whip if necessary.
t136: Work max hammers (21hpt). Chop deer if necessary.
t137: Work max hammers and complete TM at eot.

novice, let me know if these tiles don't look correct. It appeared as though working the 1/1/5 plains village and the 2/0/6 grassland town had exactly the same effect this turn, so I picked up the grassland town and gave the plains village to Gourmet Menu. Let me know if this does not work.

I made one foolish mistake this turn. I should have run the production tracking numbers BEFORE moving all of our units. This was simply stupid. If our workers were still unmoved, I could have moved three workers down to the deer forest THIS TURN, then we could have chopped the tile next turn, and 4-pop whipped the wonder to completion at eot 134. Instead, if we want to claim the wonder on that turn, we'll be forced to brutalize the capital with a 6-pop whip. We'll probably do exactly that, as we don't want to fool around with Taj. Ah well. I can still move those workers over to the deer next turn, and have it chopped on T134, but that won't help us with whipping until T135. Still probably worth moving the workers there; they can always road the deer tile even if they don't end up chopping it, right?

OK, all of that was exhausting. Let's finish up with the turn.



Eastern Dealers is working away on National Epic. It's really a shame we have to rush Taj so much; we'd prefer to kick off a Golden Age around T138 or T139, right when National Epic finishes construction. Still, we can work something like 4-5 specialists in Golden Age while finishing the wonder, and that should be good enough to push out the Great Person of our choice.

Overview:

We're just short of finishing Metal Casting tech. We'll likely run 10% science next turn and complete the tech while building up more gold again. I noticed that we're getting a huge known civ bonus for this tech; I think something like 4 or 5 teams already have Metal Casting. I believe some even discovered it on this very turn, cheapening it in the process! Nice.

There's not a great deal taking place elsewhere. Starfall double whipped its barracks, and that was about it. More workers moving and such.



Demographics. As I said, we're getting a substantial known civ tech bonus in Metal Casting, which does inflate our 100% research GNP number a bit. Someone else is also ticking up in Soldier count a bit.

I expect that by the time I look at this tomorrow, there will probably be 50 or something posts about Taj Mahal. For some reason, that brings everyone out of the woodwork. It's rather amusing, since we already have our exact plan in place, and it's largely up to watching CFC at this point. Well, we can finish the wonder eot 134 if we're willing to do a major whip, and that's likely what we will indeed do. Pray that there are no more forests at Lakshmi to be chopped down, because we can't really increase our own Taj ETA at this point.

[Sullla]

Turn 133 - 450AD

CFC can beat us to the Taj Mahal this turn if they whip... but will they whip? They haven't so far. Stay tuned.



I moved our war chariot at the start of this turn, and found a barb archer right next door. We had 96% odds to win, and that was good enough for me. Fortunately we did not get another barbarian streak of bad luck, and cleaned up the archer easily. That left the war chariot with two promotions, and I took a queue from the CivPlayers chariot that we saw to take Flanking I and Sentry promotions:



We found another crab resource in the extreme south after taking Sentry. Unfortunately there is no city placement down there able to claim both the deer tile and the crabs. Ah well. We will split that off into two different tundra iceball cities in time. With State Property civic and Great Lighthouse, these locations will be more than worth settling. Even if everyone closes borders we us, we'll be able to get some 2 commerce trade routes of our own by planting cities on the offshore icy islands down around the pole. A little more exploration down here will give us better info on where to place future cities.



Just a little bit to the east, we have final confirmation: there is no land connection in the deep south between us and CFC. We also spotted a (non-forested) deer tile down here which will serve to feed yet another iceball fishing city. I am really glad right now that we built Great Lighthouse, that will really pay off as we found more and more of these spots.

I'm going to pick up the war chariot in the galley and drop it off on the ice island to our south in a couple of turns. Worth finding out if there's anything of value down there.

We also had map trades go through with WPC and the Spanish this turn. Here's an overview shot, spoilered for size:

We now have full visibility on every city from CFC, WPC, Germans, and the Spanish. We're also getting close to visibility on all Apolyton cities, and we can see about half of UniversCiv territory. Just CivFr and CivPlayers are largely blank spots on the map. That's pretty good, especially since we have full vision on three of our four immediate neighbors. As you would expect, this looks like an excellently balanced plako map, with marble/stone/ivory located in contested areas between teams, and all of the starts mirrored with their immediate terrain. Very nice stuff.

Kjn mentioned this before, but WPC has done a truly terrible job of improving their territory. Southern Shores (buried under the interface in that screenshot) still doesn't have even one improved tile. They should have just let us settle there, we would have put those pigs and rice tiles to good use. Argh. I have no idea if we'll fight these guys later or keep them as a weak vassal, but they have done very little with the resources at their disposal in this game.



More map stuff: check out the city that CFC settled to connect their marble. What a piece of crap. Not even one food bonus here, although I guess with enough farming they could make this viable. Obviously a worthwhile play if it lands them Taj... just disappointed that this was right on their borders and ready to be claimed. The marble is actually exactly halfway between CFC and the Spanish, but sadly they didn't put up much of a fight for it. I will laugh so hard if we end up with Taj and they're stuck with this piece of junk city.

Speaking of Taj, here's the CFC city building it:



CFC chopped both of the forests in Lakshmi last turn for a further 150 production. They are sitting at 554 / 700 shields right now on their Taj build. Last turn, they had 352 shields, so they got 52 shields from natural production and 150 shields from the chop. The math here is pretty simple: if they whip Lakshmi this turn (for 4 pop), they get Taj Mahal, and we can't beat them. If they don't whip it this turn, then we would have a coinflip chance next turn. But! If they don't whip this turn, they won't whip next turn either, as they'll have concluded that they can win the race with natural production. They will finish the wonder in 3t (eot 136) via natural production, which we would beat with our whip at end of turn 134.

Again, just watch Lakshmi this turn. They have not whipped yet. If we don't see that city drop to size 4, then we will most likely land Taj Mahal. I still expect that they will, but I give us a slight chance to weasel this thing out from them. Keep those fingers crossed. (I have been nervously checking CivStats hourly. Until that whip appears, I'll hold on to hope!)

On our end, we set up our production queue in the capital to overflow into a university, to hide the production going into our own Taj build. If CFC doesn't whip, then we'll swap back to Taj at the very end of the turn. Is this a scumbag move? Oh, absolutely. I make no pretense otherwise. At the same time, CFC won't notice anything unless they are making use of production tracking via the espionage screen (they don't have enough EP to see our cities directly), and that's a bit of a scumbag move itself. They also should be able to see that we whipped the capital last turn, and overflowed into some kind of mystery build. If they aren't smart enough to put the dots together, well, that's not my fault. Call me whatever names you like, I'm the one playing the turns, and I'll take my advantages where I can get them. If CFC chooses not to whip their city, they deserve whatever blame they get for not playing things safe and guaranteeing themselves the wonder.



Here's our capital, where I made some significant tile micro changes from what we were working with originally. (Keep in mind that we are actually "building" a university right now, I swapped back after taking this picture.) So the original plan was to build the wonder naturally, along with the market/settler/temple whip overflow. That's not going to happen now - we will either 6 pop whip the wonder to completion, or we won't get it at all. This means that there's no real reason to work a bunch of high production tiles. We might as well work more cottages and high food tiles, since the whip will finish the wonder anyway (or we won't get the wonder at all and won't bother whipping).

Each whip produces 30 shields * 2.75 (for marble, Bureaucracy, and Organized Religion) = 82 shields. Whipping 6 pop gets us 82 * 3 = 246 production, since the value of whipping gets cut in half for wonders. Therefore, we need to make sure we have at a minimum 700 - 246 production in Adventure One at the end of this turn, or 454 production. I have it set up so that we get 291 + 170 = 461 production, which will leave us with enough production in the box to 6 pop whip the wonder next turn. This lets us work all but the two youngest cottages and get some more food into the capital for extra growth. I am pretty sure that this is correct, but I would appreciate it if someone else double checked things here. Thanks.



Elsewhere, here is where we have decided the new settler is going. It's a weakish spot that will probably be turned into a production city with some farms and mines down the road. The settler is visible near French Riviera, and there is a missionary coming down from the Focal Point area as well. We are going to need to chop out a theatre here after the granary, because this spot badly needs 100 culture for third ring borders. There is no other way to bring over irrigation from French Riviera's wheat tile, and this city will need grassland farms for food. With monument, religion, theatre, and an Artist or two, that shouldn't take too long.

Regarding the earlier point about workers, we actually do have workers in the area ready to road to this city. I just needed to know where the city was going, which was not decided until this very turn. There are four workers around French Riviera, who will road over here starting the turn after next, once they've brought irrigation to the wheat tile pictured.



A lot of cities are building Wealth this turn to preserve overflow into forges next turn. Note that Brick By Brick was 1 food away from growth, so I had it work a coastal tile to grow next turn while building Wealth. It will overflow into forge and work horses plus all three plains hill mines next turn. (Base 20 production/turn = 25/turn with a forge. Nice. Don't whip that city.) Cutting Edge still needs a religious spread; I've been hoping for a free one, since the shrine is all of four tiles away. We'll get a missionary there with overflow from a forge whip somewhere, probably Forbidden Fruit. Mansa's shrine is currently at +27 gold/turn without counting the market.

Overview:

Metal Casting will be finished while stockpiling gold at 10% science. We could use a consensus on what to research next; I think the general opinion is for Machinery next, although I would still love that Alphabet tech. Probably not though, sigh. It's hard to do much in the way of longterm planning until we know if CFC or our team will be getting Taj Mahal. I have not tried to sandbox further ahead until we resolve that one way or another.

The German team and CivFr both popped Golden Ages this turn, CivFr using it to swap into Bureaucracy, Organized Religion, and Buddhism religion. This affected the Demographics:



We're surprisingly competitive in GNP at 10% science and with CivFr in a Golden Age. Helps to have that known civ tech bonus on Metal Casting. Nearly all of the other teams are broke right now, all the treasuries around 100 gold or less. Production of course gets silly in a Golden Age, no worries there. Food/Land/Power all looking very nice.

No movement on espionage points, still slowly creeping towards graphs with CivFr. Is there any chance we can ask UniversCiv to stop spending EP against us, and offer them our heavily explored map in a trade again? They have said almost nothing with us diplomatically, but it sure would be nice to stop spending against them in EP.

Now we play the waiting game at Lakshmi...

[Sullla]

Turn 134 - 475 AD

The Taj Mahal race is over, and we did not win it. On to the next stage of the game.



As we knew would happen after seeing the Lakshmi whip at the end of last turn, CFC finished Taj Mahal. The timing was just as putrid as our other missed wonders earlier in the game; we could have finished Taj next turn and forced a coinflip's chance at the wonder. This is a serious setback, not only costing us the bonus production/commerce but also forcing us to burn an Anarchy turn in civics change revolt, and essentially removing the chance to force out two Great People during the Golden Age. Landing Taj would have virtually sealed up this game as a win. Instead, we'll have to keep working that much harder. We still remain in a dominant position.



Here's vision on another Apolyton city from our scout. We still haven't found their Colossus city yet, it must be around here somewhere. They refused to trade maps with our team, then let us explore almost their entire territory, so we got to see all their cities but they're getting nothing in return. Interesting decision.

Apolyton also sent us a diplomatic message this turn asking about an NAP extension and not to interfere with the barb city that popped up near their borders. It's a nice break of fortune for us; we can easily promise not to screw around with their barb city, and we want that NAP extended past Turn 150. Signing a longer peace deal with Apolyton will tie their hands when it comes to the German war. We definitely want to do this.



Major news from the south, where we spotted another crabs resource and more importantly silver on the offshore ice island. There is also a German work boat poking around here as well; this territory is due north of their land across the world wrap. We'll be able to put quite a few cities down here, I count at least four more to make use of all these seafood and deer resources. If we settle all of these locations and consume the German team, we're looking at 40-50 cities under our control down the road.

Anyway, the Sentry war chariot will head further west, while the other chariot will hop on the galley and poke around on the ice islands themselves.



Here's our settler moving over to the sheep location, on the tile east of the wheat. We had a forest grow on the city tile itself this turn, and unfortunately that will delay the founding of the city by one turn. (Suggested names for this location?) Four workers finished a farm on the tile southeast of French Riviera to spread irrigation to the wheat, and some of them will start roading over to the new city. We don't need a road connection present when founding the city for trade routes/resources, as the coastal connection with Starfall will connect it immediately.

The biggest micro question for the turn involves handling the failgold situation with Taj Mahal:



Here's the capital; we have 442 production sitting in the box for Taj Mahal. This will get converted into gold at a 1:1 ratio next turn, which will do quite a bit to fuel further teching. I don't have much experience in playing around with the failgold mechanics, so here's my question for those of you who do: will we get more failgold next turn if we keep on building Taj Mahal this turn? In other words, if we put another 50 production into Taj this turn, will we get another 50 gold next turn? Or do we get what's already in the box this turn, and nothing more?

This obviously affects how we choose to micro Adventure One for the turn. If we can get more failgold from running high production, then we'll grab all the mines and pick up another 50ish gold at the start of next turn. If we can't get more failgold, then we'll run a setup like the one here, stressing growth and cottages. Those of you who use this mechanic a lot, let me know how to play this one.

It also factors into how and when we choose to swap civics. We definitely want to pop into Nationhood civic as soon as possible; we currently get 28 commerce from the Bureaucracy bonus in Adventure One, and we would save 30 gold/turn in upkeep from switching to Nationhood. That's largely a wash in economic terms, since we don't have an Academy in the capital for a huge beaker multiplier. As for the other civics effects, the +50% production bonus in the capital is more than canceled out by getting +2 happiness from barracks, +25% Espionage Points (EP) in all cities, and the ability to draft from Nationhood civic. As I see it, we revolt to Nationhood civic this turn if we can't get any more failgold in the capital. But if we can, then obviously we want to preserve Bureaucracy civic for one more turn, and use that to accumulate more failgold via production modifier in the capital. Does that make sense?



Elsewhere, pretty much every city is building forges right now. They are just so good to have, since the +25% production gets applied to whips as well. There's going to be a rather savage bloodletting in a lot of these cities shortly as we 3 pop whip forges all over the place. The one other factor to consider here is leaving enough population to draft in some of the smaller cities. We probably want to skim a conscript out of cities like Cutting Edge and Simple Life before whipping them down for forges. I'll post in more detail on individual cities and forge whips once we know what we're doing with failgold in the capital.



We might want to revisit Eastern Dealers as well. The old plan was to whip a forge here and overflow into National Epic. I would suggest that we work all high food tiles and do exactly that. The forge isn't wasted here, as it lets us build National Epic quicker and also lets us run an Engineer specialist afterwards for low-odds lottery tickets at a Great Engineer. What does everyone think?

Similar deal at Starfall: I don't really understand the continued calls to avoid building a forge there. We're on a 3 turn whip cycle there: select build -> whip -> overflow into Globe Theatre. We can also grow 3 pop in 3 turns. The forge is essentially free to build, as we can't run the whip cycle any faster and we grow back all the population we need immediately. Yes, we could whip axes or spears instead for overflow, but those units are already outdated and could only serve as military police. I would personally much rather have 5 catapults and a forge out of Starfall instead of 6 axes. I would argue that this is another case of trying to outmicro ourselves instead of taking the simple but effective solution.

Overview:

Yes, it's a lot of forges.

On the tech path, I clicked on Horseback Riding for anyone who can see our research, but we probably want Machinery tech next so that we can draft maces. With close to 500 failgold incoming, we can research Machinery tech very quickly; I'll look at the numbers, we might actually want to run something like 20% research on this turn and then finish it with two upcoming 100% rounds of science. This would allow us to run a drafting round on T137-138, and then another drafting round ten turns later without penalty. Remember that we can draft 5 cities per turn on this Huge map, and I expect that we can get 10 maces out per round without any real difficulty. They will be unpromoted cannon fodder without Theocracy civic to back us up (sadly, a two-civic revolt will take two turns now, meaning it's not viable) but hopefully that won't matter. I think that if we research Machinery -> Horseback Riding -> Feudalism -> Guilds, we'll be in plenty good enough shape to go after the Germans on Turn 150. With all our population, we can draft an army very quickly indeed.



As kjn said, the Demographics are in pretty good shape considering the fact that three other teams are in a Golden Age right now (Germans, CivFr, CFC). We're lucky that the Germans are in a Golden Age now, that means they won't be able to trigger one when we invade. It was also a good thing that the Taj free Golden Age didn't go to the Mausoleum team (CivFr). All things considered, it could have been a lot worse.

UniversCiv is spending a lot of EP against us now, it might be hard to keep their graphs. I've been trying, but we lost them this turn, and we may not get them back. They have a lot of rathauses and we're a natural target to spend against. Everything else is about the same as before.

Final note: it was too difficult to keep updating the sandbox and also keep playing the turns. It was taking hours just to keep adjusting the sandbox before even getting to the turn, and with so many units and cities on the map now, there just weren't enough hours in the day to devote to this. My goal was to keep it up until we built the Taj Mahal, and that wonder has now fallen. This means that we won't have an elaborate micro plan stretching forward into the future anyway, so we will lose some of our efficiency. I'm honestly surprised that we were able to keep it going for over 130 turns. Sorry about that, it's just too hard to keep it going any longer.

[Sullla]

Turn 135 - 500AD

I'm going to put this into two posts. First, the usual one looking at the overview of our civ, and then a second one looking more closely at our cities.



Here's the barb city that Apolyton was asking us about. They're waiting for it to grow to size 2 to capture it, as it's guarded only by warriors. I can see why they didn't want us to attack and raze it, it would be fairly trivial to do so. But staying on good terms with their team is much more valuable than burning a size 1 barb city. Apolyton also has a settler south of the corn resource, and I expect them to found a city there next turn. They moved it right next to our chariot unprotected; a lot of teams have been awful trusting of these NAPs. I'll admit I was slightly tempted, but didn't do anything that we would regret.

I denied the CFC marble trade when it popped up without responding. That was followed by the in-game map trade with UniversCiv (which we asked for diplomatically). Here is an overview of the territory:

I may go through and subject this to more rigorous analysis later, but for now the main pattern is granary, library, and rathaus in each city. They have a lot of those rathauses, and I can't fault them for it given their Organized trait and civ pick. UniversCiv has 15 cities and room for about 5 more between the north coast and their southern jungle. They did well for themselves in the landgrab, mostly at the expense of WPC. We now have extremely good map coverage of the northern hemisphere, and really every part of them map except CivFr and CivPlayers territory. Don't trade any more maps unless we get an offer from one of these teams. We have all the vision we're likely to need, barring the world map from one of the two missing teams.



Here is CFC's newest city, which they have not renamed yet. It finally claims that pig resource which they had left abandoned for ages on end. Note that CFC now also has Iron Working tech, as their workers have begun mining the iron resource. I think they just discovered that tech this turn or last turn.

CFC only has one other city on the southern ocean right now, far off in the east. They have a lot of cities one tile off of this body of water. If we would ever get into a naval race down the road, we'll have a significant advantage in controlling these sea lanes.



Nothing too terribly noteworthy down here in the polar ocean this turn. We'll pick up the war chariot and ferry it over to the southern island next turn, and then grab the other war chariot in CFC territory and ferry it down here as well. The next dozen or so turns should be plenty to explore the islands in this region and pick out the best city locations.

Our cities all look exactly the same as last turn because we spent the turn revolting into Anarchy. Outside of moving the workers, there was nothing to change in terms of tile management. We'll get to the cities in the next post. Here's the overview:

We needed 100% science to finish Machinery tech in 2t. Running 90% science had us coming up just short, and we want some extra leeway anyway for when we whip/draft some population away. You could say that we're on a little bit of a forge emphasis here.



Demographics; remember that three competing teams (CivFr, CFC, Germans) are all currently in Golden Ages. I'm pretty happy with the numbers given that fact.

UniversCiv keeps running espionage points against us, and the turn of Anarchy has put us further behind in that battle. Would you guys rather have me run espionage points against UniversCiv or CivFr? We can probably keep graphs with one but not both. Note that if we stop spending with UniversCiv as we've been doing, we will quickly fall impossibly far behind them, just as we are with Apolyton and CivPlayers.

On to the cities next.