[SPOILERS] This Is Asgard! A Tale of Post-Ragnarok Midgard

[oledavy]

Is Petra as broken in MP as in SP? I only read about it in T-Hawk's reports, not even 100% sure what it does

It's not that it's "broken" per say. It's a situational wonder, that can be very strong or not strong at all. However, The Strip is an ungodly strong location to build it. The city has 15+ tiles that will benefit from Petra, including 6 or 7 (I can't recall how many) riverside desert hills. With petra and a farm, those become 2/3/1 tiles, 3/3/1 tiles with Civil Service. Jowy is going to have more production than anyone else in the game after he builds it, and production wins games in Civ5. Just to give you an idea of how much production we're talking about, The Strip is currently size 5. It's going to grow a lot bigger with those wheat and floodplains, but let's just start our assessment here. If he works 5 riverside desert hill farms with those pop after building Petra, that is 18 production per turn. When I last checked Demos, I am currently production just under 30 hammers per turn. So basically, one city that is going to continue to grow like a weed has 2/3 of the production of my entire empire, without any buildings built or modifiers added in. Jowy would be a huge threat with just this city, but he also has a Size 9 capital that has a high hammer output. Jowy is going to be absolutely dominating once Petra is complete, with enough hammers to do basically whatever he wants. My saving grace here is that Jowy will have a difficult time ever leveraging those hammers into an unstoppable army because of the geography of the west. But it still makes him, on this end of the continent at least, the biggest threat to win the game. If I am to win, I need to cut him down a notch any way I can.

If this game lasts until the modern era and Jowy is still a big threat, I'll be rushbuying a nuke to blow up the Strip.

I think Jowy would appreciate the irony of that

[oledavy]

You know, even though I'm currently losing this game, there are still those turns where absolutely everything comes together. This last turn was one of those:

Turn 59

I was greeted by a slew of notifications on opening the save. So let's go through them one at a time. First off, time to found a pantheon!



Stone Circles it is!

134 Faith to get a Great Prophet. With two 2 leftover from getting my pantheon added to the 8 I make each turn, I'll be able to found a religion on t77. It will probably be a turn or two sooner that that, as I have another stone resource to quarry south of Asgard.

Speaking of quarries, with perfect timing the desert stone quarry north of Midgard completed this turn.



That combined with my Marble in Valhalla is what brought me up to 8fpt.



And while I'm showing shots of all my cities:



As you may have noticed, I'm now in a golden age. The furs from Wittenburg pushed me over the edge and proc'd my first golden age. I would have prefered to get it later, but there was no way to really delay it and I'm not unhappy about getting it now.

My new ally:



A few things to note in this shot:

First off: HOLY ARMY BATMAN. Wittenburg has a huge military for a City-State. If I had that army, I could completely obliterate Jowy. And while they are at war with Jowy, they probably won't be sending that army east towards Freeside Just as well though, as it would probably end up just granting Jowy's units xp. On the plus side, this large of a military, even in the hands of the incompetent AI, will make it very hard for Jowy to take the city.

Also, not what's right beyond Wittenburg's borders. That's the Sri Prada, a natural wonder. It produces 2 food and 4 faith. I would have loved to have that close to my start and taken 'One with Nature.' Sadly, it's going to go to waste out there in the middle of the Ocean and never really benefit anyone.

My other new city-state buddy:



2 food is always nice

Back in the deserts of New Vegas:



Attacked the archer again. He's probably going to delete that worker before I can nab it, or has a unit in the city he'll use to cover it. I wonder if that was the worker from Capetown/Ragusa, in which case I'll be kicking myself after this game for not taking it when I had the chance and killing an archer instead.

End Turn.

[oledavy]

One more note from the turn: This is why I continue to be pessimistic about my position, and keep in mind these are Golden Age Demos



Stupid jungle start.

[oledavy]

So, Azza and I exchanged embassies.



I hate the RNG at times. That capital is absolutely gorgeous and infinitely better than mine.

[Kurumi]

NOMNOMNOM Update <3

[oledavy]

A lot has happened since my last update, let me try to bring you guys up to speed.

Turn 65

My war of harassment against Jowy did not end happily. While I did manage to kill his second archer and take a worker (not one of the abducted ones sadly), he brought in a spear at the perfect moment to cut off my avenue of retreat. Additionally, he declared war on Capetown again to steal a third worker, replacing the one I had just taken. He cornered my horseman and worker on the peninsula north of Capetown, and so I deleted the worker and gifted the horseman to Wittenburg. The net exchange was about even. He lost 52 hammers and probably ~15 influence with Capetown to my 50 hammers when you discount the worker trade. It did prevent him from moving reinforcements to Novac and delayed the improvement of The Strip by a couple turns. However, Serdoa took Novac with no difficulty so my efforts likely made no impact on the outcome of things over there. All in all, it wasn't really worth it. If I had gotten my horseman and worker out, I think it would have been. Alas, that was not in the cards.

The newly Mayan city of Novac:



As you may have gathered from my last update, I met Azza. I've now met Ichabod as well, and proposed a deal to him this turn to let my scout through his borders to continue meeting people.



So, let's take a look at the minimap shall we?



Pindicator is likely somewhere between Ichabod and Azza, but where are all the city-states? Also, Serdoa has a lot of land to expand into, though he has made no moves to utilize it so far. In fact, he's still off in wonderland at the moment.



That's the Hagia Sophia you can see being built in Palenque. I really think Serdoa needs to start worrying about his crappy demos......

Ichabod is also building a shiny.



What I am up to? I'm setting up to build the National College in my hammer starved capital:



I'm buying a library into Jotunheim next turn, and then, after the Ampitheater and Midgard Library finish, it'll be time to start construction.

My other challenge is getting ahold of diamonds and silver.



Serdoa refused my first offer, but I have yet to give up. Ichabod has both. Currently working on improving my other two truffle resources so I can trade for them. Could really use another round of city-state quests though, a "who can produce the most faith" quest would be especially nice.

Cleared out the barb camp to the north this turn to speed up my acquisition of a library by a turn, got a nasty surprise:



That warrior might be toast, which would be quite sad.



My crop yield is looking really solid these days, but I still need to get my production numbers up.

Everyone now has a pantheon:



Won't be long before religions start falling. And that's the situation on Turn 65.

End Turn.

[T-hawk]

Did you actually sign peace with Jowy?

That warrior might survive. Barb archers do fairly little damage. Or it's possible the second (western) one might just move away instead of shooting.

[oledavy]

Did you actually sign peace with Jowy?

That warrior might survive. Barb archers do fairly little damage. Or it's possible the second (western) one might just move away instead of shooting.

Yep, and he just signed peace with Wittenburg.

It will probably survive, I just wish I had known that archer was back there or I wouldn't have taken the risk in the first place.

[oledavy]

Turn 66

So, this was a major turn in this game, and not so much in what I did this turn, but in what happened abroad.

So, I opened the turn to see this:



"Petra has been built in a faraway land"

The knell of the beginning of a new era, an era of prosperity and untold power for our neighbors to the north.

But it was not to be:



Azza took Petra from Jowy, probably through use of the Liberty Great Engineer. And yes, I know Azza is by far the strongest civ in this game right now (in fact his large army indicates he is about to go to war with Ichabod/Pindicator or is already at war with Pindicator). However, there is no way in hell Azza has a stronger Petra site than Jowy has. The implications of this are enormous. I have no idea how close Jowy actually was to landing Petra, but he had to be building it.

I'm going to risk being proved wrong in the future and say Jowy's game is now over. He's lost a city, and the key wonder he needed to become a regional hegemon. He's going to remain a potent force, but he now no longer can win the game. I cannot overstate how important the wonder was for Jowy to land. Without it, he simply doesn't have the economic might to project power south of the Jotun mountains. The constraining geography of his land works both ways, as it does for me. While we're both relatively isolated from anyone who would do us harm and hard to get at with any susbstantial force, it also makes it difficult for either of us to project power outwards and have an impact on the rest of the continent. Petra offered a way to supercharge Jowy's economy and create enough surplus to project significant force elsewhere on the continent. Without it, there's no way for him to get the requisite hammers to do so any time soon. He will not become a regional hegemon and threaten to overrun me and Serdoa at this point.

The most rational thing for Jowy to do at this point would be to sit back and expand into his lands/tech and wait for an opportunity to get back in the game. However, people are rarely rational actors and I doubt he will do this. He has an axe to grind with both me and Serdoa now, and I have no doubts there will be camel archers in our future. The real question is: who does he hate more? I don't know if my marauding horseman cost him Petra, but it might have. If that's the case, he's going to hate me more than Serdoa taking Novac (and it would also validate my decision to attack him as my best decision all game). If my raiding had no impact, he's going to hate Serdoa more and seek to reclaim Novac. We'll see I suppose. It won't be difficult to defend against him if he does come though. I'll have 1-tile passes to defend, I'll simply build a couple units, place them in the bottlenecks and build forts, and weather whatever Jowy might send my way. More than likely, if he does go to war with me, he'll take out his aggression on my city-state allies.

Anyway, wall of text up there, but I can't overstate how huge this move was for the metagame.

Props to you Azza, but I'm now hoping you'll squander your ungodly amazing start or Ichabod will attack you with Keshiks.

So, let's get to the rest of the turn.



The warrior survived with 15 hp. He'll probably need to survive one more turn of barb archer fire though. Hopefully my archer got him low enough that he won't be able to lay down enough damage.



I rush bought a library in Jotunheim, and will be starting the National College three turns from now.

The disappointing news from this turn is that Ichabod refused to open his borders to me. Since I just spent all my money on a library, I need to wait a turn before I can offer him more gold just to get through his friggin borders. I briefly considered declaring war on him to get through, but rethought it quickly.



Went ahead and took the turn to try and get gems out of Ichabod to proc the quest with Wittenburg.



Obligatory Demographics Shot



End Turn.

[Kurumi]

Photobucked limit ;_;
can't see pictures ole!davy!