[SPOILERS] Fire and Blood: Nyles Standish and Zalson watch the world burn

[NylesStandish]

Hey Nyles,

I'm having trouble getting into the game (right now it is just getting the game started that's the issue) so I can't see anything for myself. Any terrible occurrences? Wonderful victories?

Nothing really huge to report this turn. Pindicator hasn't moved his warrior closer to the capital so I'm presuming he's got the warrior still on the old spot. Also, our scout killed a wolf (not shown).

I whipped Valyria as planned. Part of me wants to try and take the old spot from him, but it seems very chancy, and in order to do it reliably we'd have to send the next warrior coming out of the capital there and wait for our guys to kill his. It'd be decent if we could kill the defending warrior before he plants, but if he plants first it's better to wait for axes.

The southern site doesn't have to be fought for immediately and is the clear choice if we want to get axes out faster since we don't have to wait for any border pops to access copper like the old northern spot. Still not completely sure and we've only got a few turns left to make a decision; leaning to the southern site somewhat.

TBS's scout was just exploring our capital/cutting through our territory to go around a lake. He asked peace as soon as his scout was out of our borders.

[Zalson]

Going to try to log in now and take a look. It looks like we're trying to minimize the amount of time we're moving our settler unescorted?

Chopping the forest into a second worker? Only pausing growth to get the hammers into the worker?

[Zalson]

I think we still want to go for the southern site. That way we can have potentially 2 cities putting pressure on an aggressive plant from pindicator.

So I moved South-East. D'oh.



Just realized that wetbandit ended his turn. So I rolled it. Cross your fingers.



We survived. Not with flying colors but colors, at least. 1.2 of 2.

We should be ready to get in position to found turn after next. The blue circles want 1 north we will ignore their wisdom to get a pig tile and immediate copper.

Fortified the new warrior in Valyria. Started another warrior which we can switch off into a worker. Unfortunately, we won't grow in the meantime.

Alternatively, we could chop out a spearman. I think we could use another worker. If someone attacks us this early, we're going to be in trouble. Or we have early axes.

Alison is at size 4. Pindicator just got bronzeworking, I think.

Research choice after the wheel? I think it has to be agriculture, right? We also need to see about horses.

[NylesStandish]

I agree with agriculture after the wheel.

Next build in Valyria should probably be another worker.

I'll play the turn in a bit but I got a look inside before T28 ended:




Pindicator founded his second city on that sheep tile. That blue highlight is a bug where you can select a defensive unit, hold right click and hover the cursor over the squares in the fog to find cities; the fortify icon gets highlighted blue to suggest you fortify units there even though it's another player's city. Not really necessary in this case since you can infer the city's position from the cultural borders, but that means it's not unethical either.

The directly-on-copper city now has the disadvantage of being on a tile that Pindicator has vision on which makes me like it a lot less. One tile south of that still gets pigs 1st ring, gets more hammers from the copper in the long run, and most importantly is not visible to Pindicator. I personally think we should found 1 tile south unless we want to rush Pindicator literally as fast as possible, since the long term military disadvantages would outweigh the short term military advantage of quicker access to axes and spears. We'd have to keep a larger and more diverse garrison in that city than otherwise because not only would Pindicator know exactly how much he needs to take it, he can mass troops in a city that we can't see into and is as literally as close to our city as another city can be. Horse units can hit us from the fog when he builds a road on that plains hill. I don't think Pindicator is going to rush us, he's going go by the book and farm and build and wait until later to fight if at all, and with Commodore in his court he'll certainly do a bang up job of developing peacefully. However, I don't want our second city to be in such a vulnerable spot long term, unless it allows us to either take Pindicator's new city or raze it and found in its place, in which case the spot is no longer vulnerable.

[Zalson]

I'm fine with founding 1 tile further south for a long-term play. But that's an extremely aggressive plant from pindicator -- ours was also going to be aggressive, true. Can we make him pay in the next 5 turns or so? He can't have archery, right? Right?

We can always go put a choke on him. That settlement means peace will be very hard to come by.

I'll try to work out how many axes we can get in the next 6 turns or so. If we can get several (6+) it might be worth it.

[NylesStandish]

I don't now how much we can do in the next 5 turns. We've got 2 warriors, and one of them is injured. We can't attack directly with these but we might be able to harass with the warrior in the capital and delay Pindicator's copper.

Even if we settle on the copper, I don't even think we can get 2 axes out in 6 turns: 3 hammers/turn from city tile + 3 hammers/turn from a forest plains hill = 6 hammers/turn, our worker has to spend a couple of turns to move down there, but even if he was there he'd output an average of 5 hammers/turn chopping (20 hammers/(3 turns chopping + 1 turn moving onto forest)). That comes out to 65 hammers and only one axeman in 6 turns, number 2 comes in 7. No whips because no food with this micro, and even if we go all food we won't get another citizen for 8 turns. No axes from Valyria because no roads to Volantis and no copper in Valyria.

Once we have the pigs pastured we can whip every 4 turns or so as long as happiness allows, but, again, we need to get the worker down there first.

I don't think he's got archery yet but I could be wrong.

Leaning even more towards the south but still not sure. Want to take another look at the demos and see what he's got and see if we can work some magic. If he doesn't have archery and we can deny his copper with a warrior one or two axemen could do the trick. We've got plenty of time left on the clock to figure it out though.

[NylesStandish]

I'll get the turn before it rolls; still want to sim a couple of things before a final decision is made.

[Zalson]

Thanks, Nyles. I am going to be unable to hop into the game for the next few days. My Civ-computer has started crawling which means I wasn't able to test things like I wanted to.

I'm fine with the southern city placement you've supported. Not much we could have done with a creative/expansive India right next door. They're going to get the second city up faster that we could have -- unless we went settler first. Which -- why would we do that?

[NylesStandish]

Moved everything into position. Worker is coming down to improve the pig and copper.




Turn rolled. Haven't settled yet or done anything in the south, but I walked onto a hill that had a lion hidden behind it. We should win, but fuck lions.

[Zalson]

Were you able to run any simulations? Any results to share?