[PB63 Spoilers] Ginger and Lazteuq find a way to peace

[Lazteuq]

Huh, that's not much of a cold and desolate polar region after all. Still, it's a lot less appetizing than the land between us and Mjmd. I wonder why. If we're equally spaced, I would have expected equally nice border land to fight over. It looks like with Bing we should be able to achieve one of those "stable borders" I've heard so much talk about.
I totally don't understand what you mean by two strips of land, can you draw a picture or something? Are you imagining a long skinny map or roughly square?

I played a bit more with the sim you made, that overflow is pretty slick. Alas, the details of settler and worker moves all still depend on where copper is.
Where do you want to send the upcoming scout? I was thinking east.
I agree with sending one of the workers to the second city right away.
I'm not worried about a worker running out of things to do in the capitol, because he can go wherever the 3rd city will go.
Edit: Now that we know we won't be seeing much border pressure from the south or east, settling the third city on the cow/silver/floodplains area seems like a very solid choice.

The "default" tech order after BW would be  Agri -> AH -> Wheel -> Pottery right? 
I'm thinking Agri and AH are each still somewhat flexible, depending on where we find copper. For example, if it's by the red dot we've been talking about, AH could be ignored for a bit longer.
Ah, I just calculated that Agri's 20% savings for both Pottery and AH is worth ~56 beakers, which is nearly the 63 beakers of Agri itself. That's hard to argue with.

I'd lean against oracling CoL but it's your choice. Part of my reason is that really early Caste isn't helpful yet, we'd still want to be in Slavery. I don't think slow teching CoL when we want it is that bad. Pyramids feels more powerful and probably less risky.

I question if it's worth trying to counter the ORG civs' espionage dominance or to just accept it and try to hide units in the areas not covered by city vision, or hide them on boats. I don't know enough about the formula for achieving city vision to really say, but it feels like you have to spend too much to counter it. Maybe because city vision was balanced with counterespionage missions in mind but CtH disabled those? I really don't know what I'm talking about.

I logged in and looked at the KTBs, thinking about what Bing might be researching. Wheel is the only thing he has that we can access but don't have. He started Mining/Wheel. If he wanted Agriculture, he could have got it and another tech already. If he went Hunting-BW, he would be on a similar path as us, except he also doesn't have Fishing. Not sure if we can conclude anything. He might have the same start as us?


Several things today have triggered PB60 PTSD.   That   thing.....ORG.....It scares me.
That lobby game we just played was a PB60-like brutal awakening to the perils of delaying military techs "just a little bit longer" to build more infrastructure. By rough estimate I spend 1200 raw hammers on ORG courthouses, SPI temples, and forges, and I burned a ton of beakers on Theology too. I was seduced by the +25% of Organized Religion and the AP. Big regrets.
More importantly, you played well. The number of Great People you managed to grind out was honestly surprising.

In somewhat related news, I'm really warming up to War Weariness.

[Ginger()]

Huh, that's not much of a cold and desolate polar region after all. Still, it's a lot less appetizing than the land between us and Mjmd. I wonder why. If we're equally spaced, I would have expected equally nice border land to fight over. It looks like with Bing we should be able to achieve one of those "stable borders" I've heard so much talk about.
I totally don't understand what you mean by two strips of land, can you draw a picture or something? Are you imagining a long skinny map or roughly square?

   

Where do you want to send the upcoming scout? I was thinking east.
...
Now that we know we won't be seeing much border pressure from the south or east, settling the third city on the cow/silver/floodplains area seems like a very solid choice.
...
The "default" tech order after BW would be  Agri -> AH -> Wheel -> Pottery right? 
...
I'd lean against oracling CoL but it's your choice. Part of my reason is that really early Caste isn't helpful yet, we'd still want to be in Slavery. I don't think slow teching CoL when we want it is that bad. Pyramids feels more powerful and probably less risky.
...
I question if it's worth trying to counter the ORG civs' espionage dominance or to just accept it and try to hide units in the areas not covered by city vision, or hide them on boats. I don't know enough about the formula for achieving city vision to really say, but it feels like you have to spend too much to counter it. Maybe because city vision was balanced with counterespionage missions in mind but CtH disabled those? I really don't know what I'm talking about.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. I think I agree with all your conclusions. If other lurkers can chime in with other little tricks to deal with EP, that would be much appreciated. 

I logged in and looked at the KTBs, thinking about what Bing might be researching. Wheel is the only thing he has that we can access but don't have. He started Mining/Wheel. If he wanted Agriculture, he could have got it and another tech already. If he went Hunting-BW, he would be on a similar path as us, except he also doesn't have Fishing. Not sure if we can conclude anything. He might have the same start as us?

I switched EP to Bing as Mjmd and I got graphs on each other and he switched off (means he met someone or maybe I misread the EP interface  ) Good thing all civ players can be nonpartisan and dunk on the BtS Espionage system, damn it grinds my gears. I'm curious if I should dump more EP into Mjmd to give him the slip with demos or keep up the illusion that I haven't met anyone else, or if I should get graphs on Bing. I think the strategic thing to do would be to block Mjmd's demo vision temporarily, but the fun thing is to get some more graphs to read  .  Oh the things you can worry about in early game when you have only one scout move per turn...

Several things today have triggered PB60 PTSD.   That   thing.....ORG.....It scares me.
That lobby game we just played was a PB60-like brutal awakening to the perils of delaying military techs "just a little bit longer" to build more infrastructure. By rough estimate I spend 1200 raw hammers on ORG courthouses, SPI temples, and forges, and I burned a ton of beakers on Theology too. I was seduced by the +25% of Organized Religion and the AP. Big regrets.
More importantly, you played well. The number of Great People you managed to grind out was honestly surprising.

In somewhat related news, I'm really warming up to War Weariness.

In the FFA, as soon as your GA triggered, I realized I had probably exactly that window of time to prevent you from getting Cats/Longbows. As for the Great People generation I was Industrious with and was running 11 specialists between two cities to try and get the 2nd and 3rd GA with MoM (I had to burn my first on limping to Currency without MoM built), of course this was all without NE or Pacifism cycles  . I think for our purposes this game no WW is probably good. Rep bonus happy maxes out at 3 and for only 5 cities, while everyone else running Human Resources will have functionally infinite happiness with archers as military police.

[Lazteuq]

It's like a Rorschach inkblot! Looks like one sockpuppet yelling at the other to me.
How would you spread an odd number of players though? I guess one strip could be wider so it's 5 starts are staggered E-W to keep spacing. I'm skeptical, but I don't have a better idea right now.

I definitely think spending EP on Bing is better.

[Ginger()]

   

Near no easy food (requires capital border pop), requires wheel tech, and on a hill for -2 worker turns if a tag team it. This is deliberately difficult to reach. TIHI Tarkeel 

This wouldn't be a problem at all if I wasn't sweating about a Chariot rush, but I'm gonna positively throw a fit if Mjmd's horses are on a river . (Not that it really matters, he went worker first and starts with Wheel)

Yeah the scout could go east to finish mapping the coast, or it could go north east then tack north west to scout out our main competitor. Considering we easily fit 6 cities without going east of that mountain, I think the time-sensitive thing to do is find out what Mjmd is up to. 

[Miguelito]

So where are you going to settle?

[Ginger()]

So where are you going to settle?

I'm waiting for lurker input before finalizing, but as I see it at the moment, probably 1 South of the cow. I like the long-term prospects for the city, between the corn, copper, and plains cow, it should have fabulous non-whip production, probably going to be the site of our Pyramids. I hate how short term it will have to steal the deer and then probably stagnate at size two, working the Deer and the 6H copper tile, only getting to improve the Corn at turn 50--it's going to be a much slower payoff than the original plan of settling for the wheat. Rome will probably work the oasis after losing Deer. 

The worker plan to chop out second worker and first settler remains the same, except now I'm teching Wheel > Agr > AH > Pottery, and the workers after finishing their synchronous turn 28 chops for turn 29 settler, will move onto and road the two hills diagonally NorthEast out of the capital, for the 2 commerce trade route, copper hook up, and unit logistics. Given the newfound delay in AH, I am back to wondering whether it is worth the worker turns to mine the pig, but my hunch is that just chopping would be better.

This is a disappointing downgrade in our plans, but a necessary one. Nobody cares how fast our start is if we're dead. In my crystal ball I foresee myself doing a lot of self-comforting with my MFG stat when the CY looks sad.

This is the current dotmap:
   

[Lazteuq]

Your plan looks good to me. Anywhere else will probably develop even slower.
The best alternative I can think of is this:

This establishes a pretty conservative Mjmd border early and brings in floodplains. Has about the same number of forests once you subtract everything the capitol will chop, and production potential is similar. Worker effort would be about the same. It really wants AH to get those capitol pigs.
I don't especially like it though, and I can't pin down exactly why. What do you think?

I'm convinced, monitoring Mjmd with the scout sounds like a great idea. Watch for a tile with a suspicious extra hammer. We'll probably be able to slip past his borders and go farther north to meet his neighbor.

[Ginger()]

Your plan looks good to me. Anywhere else will probably develop even slower.
The best alternative I can think of is this:

This establishes a pretty conservative Mjmd border early and brings in floodplains. Has about the same number of forests once you subtract everything the capitol will chop, and production potential is similar. Worker effort would be about the same. It really wants AH to get those capitol pigs.
I don't especially like it though, and I can't pin down exactly why. What do you think?

I'm convinced, monitoring Mjmd with the scout sounds like a great idea. Watch for a tile with a suspicious extra hammer. We'll probably be able to slip past his borders and go farther north to meet his neighbor.

I considered that plant 1NW of the copper, but I ran into the same feeling of "wrong" that you seem to get. If I had to pin it down, I think it is because, A, it is inflationary, it increases our city count while claiming the same amount of land, but I think that moreover it's wrong because, B, the four new cities don't have concrete identities. Each city in the original plan has a specialization that is immediately obvious from its geography (Green is a border fort/unit pump, Yellow does commerce, Indigo does production). While your two purple dots (squares?) make for fine cities, the very high overlap and low resource density of your green and yellow dots make for poor long-term spots, especially if Mjmd decides to claim the midway-cow by planting one north of it near his lake.

Mjmd was pretty nosy with his scout, even DoWing to get city vision. I won't go that far, but if he's interested in peaceful relations, he shouldn't mind me hugging around his borders snooping considering he did the same.

[Ginger()]

In sims news, from the current turn 29 first settler I've projected a turn 37 second settler, with two turn 49 settlers, with one spear built inbetween. After the turn 48 whips/chops I can either overflow into more military (to complement the 1 sole spearman) or into half-building granaries. 5 cities (counting cap) by turn 50 should be respectable enough to not fall behind, unless I've drastically underestimated my opponents. Given that this is something of farmers gambit, I will probably pull my scouts back from the thrilling joys of discovery in order to sentry and provide forewarning if I need to whip spears. 

I could probably accelerate the time frame if I skipped building the one spear in Antium (the first settle by the copper), I don't think I'm in the mood for being completely naked though. In other news after some finagling with the map camera, I've confirmed suspicions about the map being toroidal and BING and Mjmd being neighbors
   

[Ginger()]

   
   
   
The state of the union after 24 days in office