[SPOILERS] WillPlunder as Mehmed of Arabia: Noobs meet world

[WilliamLP]

I also realize we need Hunting to build spears, so I'm switching over to that right now. It's due in 4 turns. You can try and convince me to go back to AH, but if Kuro decides to commit to war, axes aren't going to be good enough.

[Plunder]

Well, axes on defence in a city with a decent culture won't give him 99% odds

but yes. hunting now is best

what mess this game haha

[WilliamLP]

Yeah, I think axes are better off trying to go on the offensive against chariots, since the chariots get their bonus otherwise.

We whipped the settler. Here's what the copper site looks like:




My preference is to settle 1NW of copper, to not waste the excellent 1/5/1 production tile. It gets copper hooked up on T55, and all three workers have to get down there to make it happen. The alternative is to settle on copper, which can hook up T54. Just what we need is another city with terrible food until calendar, right?

I have the scout checking out the N:




Our demos stink after the whip:




Kuro's blowing us away in food now, and 1 chariot pretty much messes us up, with bad luck.

[WilliamLP]

We got the turn 51 border pop:




Look at that grass copper, five tiles away from our capital, just taunting us from another landmass!

Our settler is out, and is on his way to the copper site. We're chopping a couple more insurance warriors in the capital. There are 2 available there now, and there will be 5 in two turns, probably enough to stop two chariots from pillaging left and right.




If I play another game here, I'll have to lean how to correlate demo graphs with civstats, and avoid off-by-1 errors. I'm not entirely sure if the rise by 4 was the same turn Kuro discovered a tech, or the turn after. Researching either Hunting or AH, and producing a warrior at the same time, would have produced a power rise of 4 too. But I think we really have to play as if it's a chariot, especially since at this very moment another player appears to be getting chariot rushed.

Unless we could have ruled it out somehow. There's more obsessive C&D we could be doing that I'm not doing. That would include trying to infer exactly what techs they have by looking at times to research, and also looking at the Espionage mission costs, which can reveal how many hammers they currently have accumulated in their capital.

It might be pretty effective in these games to make a move like they are, deliberately creating an illusion that a chariot is being created on the power graph, just to get a player like me to freak out.




After the whip, Azza has a single city at size 2, working 8 food.

[Plunder]

Maybe they will freak out too, I mean, our graph must look crazy now!
If they didn't make a chariot, I have a hard time believing that they know that we think they build one. Then how would they interpret our graph?
They must think we're planning something!

I do hope they made a chariot, otherwise we look very silly.

And if they didn't, maybe an experienced player can explain us in a few turns (when it doesn't matter anymore), how we could've known it wasn't a chariot.

[WilliamLP]

Hah, yeah. We're going to make two warriors at the end of the turn, and then we're getting Hunting plus another warrior the turn after that, which will look like two 4-point increases. On the plus side, if they don't have copper hooked up themselves very soon, maybe a couple of spears and/or axes marching over there can actually mess them up.

I'm also imagining how different this game would be with full diplo and NAPs.

If there's a bright side to our position, it's that if we can shore up our defense, once we have Calendar and IW, there's a lot of land for us to the S and E that seems basically uncontested. And this mass of warriors isn't a complete waste; they're also good for fog busting and happiness garrisons for future cities.

[WilliamLP]

So... I played after Kuro last turn, and to be gentlemanly, I think I should play after him from now on, when things could matter, knowing full well that other people here wouldn't give me the same courtesy in peace time.

We saw a scouting warrior last turn:




To be jerks, we would double move our two warriors onto the forest 2N1E right now, then kill the scouting warrior after it moves forward. (With a decent chance to win the first fight at even odds.)

Not doing that and keeping the second half of the turn, the question is, are we ok with letting that warrior scout around? If not, after he moves we could declare war, move the scout S to the forest (where he has Woodsman), and maybe move 1 warrior onto the forest and 1 onto the hill to block his path.

If we do let him scout around, he could clear some barbs for us, or also could be a pain in the butt for worker micro. If we do try to kill him, we might lose 1 warrior each, and gain a promotion on one of ours, for a slight edge to us vs them, but non-zero for both of us together.

Thoughts on this?

[Plunder]

what about moving onto the hill 2N2E, Could they see our capital from there (since it's on a hill)? Then it's important to prevent a view into our capital.

[WilliamLP]

They can't see the capital from that hill. Hills see two tiles in every direction, and don't see through forests. I don't remember if they see through other hills or not.

I decided that we don't want them scouting around our territory, knowing our exact city locations, limiting micro plans by wandering around workers, etc. So I declared war!




There's a mini chess game going on. War is needed for the scout to block him on the forest to the SE. He has +70% defense there, so if we wants to trade the warrior for a scout, with a decent chance to lose, that would be great. A warrior also is needed to block him from the forest SW. If he moves S onto the hill, it's a mini-trap, and we should be able to get his warrior in a 2 for 1. If he moves E, it's just an impasse and we just prevent him from moving further S.

I could have put a warrior on the hill, but then he'd just move E and I'd rather try and trap him.

Let's see what happens.

In the south, we settle next turn at a food poor site (before calendar), and then have the copper up two turns after that. At least it has a river so we can put a couple farms there, and it has the very nice copper tile.




We're actually paying a point of unit cost this turn for the first time. I was reading about the exact game mechanic, as with much in Civ 4, it's kind of screwy. We have free support for 8 units on Monarch, plus 24% of our total population, so another free unit at pop 5, 9, 13, etc. We have 10 (3 workers, settler, scout, 5 warriors) so we're 2 over. Then you take 30% of the amount you're over (on Monarch) and round that up for a "handicap" discount, so we pay 1, not 2. Weird... You also have another counter for supply cost for units outside of borders, and 4 are free, and it has the handicap discount too, so actually 5 are free.

The full reference is here.

[NobleHelium]

There is no handicap discount for supply. The fifth unit is free because it costs 1 gold per 2 units, rounding down.