turn 150 overview
er, excuse me,,,, turn TWO50
the game's half over
and i'm sure we're favorites for that histograph win..... or would that be a histograph draw, under the no-score mod?
anyways i've assiduously avoided big milestone updates but habits are made to be broken (says me of the three-hour civ turns....)
for fun you may wish to compare with
our t243 update - anything look different?
you can see i've finally realized what i should have noticed 20 turns ago - railroads turn our northern border with ginger from "defensible" into an out-and-out disaster. kirishima, takayasu, and takanosho one city to the south are all 1-turnable from the fog by a tank stack after ginger declares war, from anywhere within 4 railed (or combat worker-railable!) tiles from the border. so i dropped every city in range on culture builds (kirishima will follow next turn post-forge), and had the cities that can swap the free mercs specialist over to an artist. luckily for us, mitakeumi's fourth-ring borders mean TWO of the critical tiles are in range (at takayasu and takanosho), so it seemed worth culture building here too even though we're delaying a precious, 1/3-finished levee to do so.... of course, if ginger notices they can just swap THEIR cities to culture builds to counteract that but a) hopefully they don't notice until we already have some amount of a lead and b) those notably are not tank builds, so if they do this they are still trading 1 for 1 in hammers with us which is not terrible
anyways, wakamotoharu, having finished its great prophet, is now belatedly growing onto the last moai tiles so i can draft off them
kirishima is small-on-purpose, first because WMH needed the corn and now i plan to keep it that way to minimize the damage we'll take from a ginger attack there. it and takayasu were doing their best ™ to get levees up (forge was a levee semi-prebuild, so we can work an engineer to get it done quicker) but if it appears next turn that there's any chance of flipping the tiles before war breaks out that will have to be backburnered
everyone else is spamming treb -> cannon save monster takakeisho, who would love to start ironworks after the levee completes but.... probably it has to just supply a few more cannon instead.
i'm also planning to start drafting a bit closer to "for real" this turn - you can see that hokutofuji is on a coast tile so it is a likely victim. keisho and WMH are exempt for now as we need them size 18 and 14, respectively, to give boosted trade routes to a large number of cities. the rest will get hit, but probably not for a few turns - better to draft from further away cities first so the troops can reach the front in time
the former border region with GT has seen the most ridiculous growth post-biology.... atamifuji and hoshoryu have become shockingly huge very quickly, and nearly all of the cities in former GT have become among our best producers. this border region, so hilly and miserable for so long, is now Unleashed, for whatever good it will do us, training cavs to fight off tanks
or um... building wealth, as tomokaze is doing with its 25 hpt (a few cities have to do this or our trebs will actually come out trebs next turn....)
lalibela, among our best hammer cities since size 2, is now out to 37 hpt and is about to get a coal mine. even myogiryu, former garbage filler that i almost didn't settle, is up to 27, almost in 4 turn cav range. gondar is our first city that has grown onto a specialist due to a combo of high food surplus and low tile count due to american cultural pressure, and my finger hovered over the draft button until i realized it is actually itself boosting trade routes in around 10 cities at size 14. so that merchant is producing some 14 effective commerce, and is worthwhile for now. abi is frantically starving down for our next golden age which SHOULD come in 19 turns if (we live that long and) do not roll the merchant chance
and aksum finished our first levee this turn and has ascended to godhood
yeah, maybe i over did it a bit.... we are now MORE than 1t-ing a rifle (or cav, if we wanted to go that route) and are going to just start building overflow from here until we hit the cap (is it 110 base hammers for a rifle, or 110 post-modifiers = 49 base hammers?). so the plan is to make commando-eligible rifles every turn until we would waste overflow, then dump a big chunk of it into a more expensive infra project like a library or market, which i do think are worth making here with the city up to 40 raw commerce unboosted. i was torn on whether to make the levee at all or not, until i realized this city could probably use such tricks to make a 1t university and bank, which we will need eventually if oxford and wall street are to be in our (distant) future
meisei and ichiyamamoto have also ascended from miserable filler status to demigodhood. ichiyamamoto in particular was garbage all game long - we founded it early just for the silver and it stagnated at under size 6 doing nothing for (literal) ages on end. but now with bio, everything has changed. kinbozan by contrast represents the fate of our desert core - it carried us in terms of commerce for so long (and it and tobizaru are still strong commerce cities) but will probably never surpass size 7 with me shaving a draftee off every 13 turns (that's how long it takes to get from 5->7). i may sacreligiously farm over its towns
since working 2 desert hill windmills instead (and building wealth) is actually better (and will be much better with a factory and environmentalism). similarly ichi is getting a silver-bladed windmill soon (and should have done so a while ago) since there is not enough food to work all the hills in this region even with one, so silver windmill + desert windmill gives more yields than a silver mine alone
here is takanosho of part 2 of the depressing border situation fame. i think this is the tile we're most likely to get back, though we are furthest behind right now in terms of percentages - it and mita are putting 72 culture/turn on it, and we have a ring bonus vs the offending (taj-building....) ginger city as well. and thank goodness, it would be a nightmare to have to stack obsolete garbage here as well as in kirishima/takayasu (which can at least help defend one another, in that one can help counterattack wounded units that tried to attack the other). daieisho, crappy for so long, is the miserable desert success story, with pretty much 2 worthwhile tiles and 35 hammers/turn. and tobizaru is sad and has been stuck on research duty over continuing its crawl towards a 6-hammer levee and borderline-relevance
ok, so this area has not really changed since t243.... it's provided a lot of draftees though! and is about to provide more, with hungary rush due to be drafted again this turn, CTR next turn (for now three rifles we've gotten out of this miserable culture war - that's even more than mjmd got for free by flipping it
). and even Ultimate Filler onosho is surprisingly close! these cities are all running artists, though i'm starting to question whether they will actually pay off before the game's end. probably merchants would have been better but i want that plains town!!! it is in range of three cities, getting ring bonuses from two of them, yet is still at only 40%! that indian city must have some crazy culture infrastructure.... anyways, if we do stick with the artists, these cities are likely to hit FOURTH-ring borders during our golden age or shortly thereafter, at which point we should finally see some real movement here.... until mjmd turns on the culture slider, that is
ura, once among our mightiest cities, is... still pretty mighty. i finally remembered that it's a border city and have stacked a (token) garrison here.... 5 desert tiles is a lot, but it's better than GGGA stacking, which is working some of the most miserable tiles i have ever contemplated (4 hammer desert copper mine, THREE hammer desert hill mine....) for lack of worker labor and with 9 draft unhappy faces on the books for 30 turns. so it goes.... despite it all the city is still strong at 22 hpt, though not on the level of its companion
DotR, which is also working some pretty miserable tiles (desert silver mine....) but is 3t from a levee :O
magnus, as i think i mentioned in passing, is to my somewhat-surprise the best of our greenline acquisitions, and at 41 hammers per turn is our third-strongest producer. and work ethic is our dumbest, up FIVE sizes in seven turns (!!) and probably about to power-grow to 18 to boost some trade routes in the north. when food-optimized it has a cool +17 food surplus, seems legit. you can see from the pins that i'm even contemplating an ultra-late globe theater here! probably won't do it but while we do technically have enough cities to hit the "draft every city every 10 turns" dream of no-net-draft-unhappy, in practice we have enough food-capped undraftable plains hill windmill spots that i don't think we can actually get away with it. so it would be nice to get the load lightened somewhat (and unlike other cities with high food surplus, there is really nothing else viable we can do with bare plains to make it a worthwhile food sink)
we're finally working all of greenline's towns almost! well, we COULD be, but pillage farming is the only city in range of those two southernmost plains ones and i have it on food-neutrals instead. that city has a miserable slow-growth period ahead of it as we try to work up to getting all its levee tiles online (and taking the other towns back from ouch in so doing). but it is making 28 hpt so that's chill
CSR as i mentioned is working 3 coast tiles for lack of space to add more draft unhappy.... but after seeing the gondar sitch (which, by boosting TRs at size 14, somewhat obviates the need for another size 14 city down here to do the same) i may draft it once more just the same. coast is coast (is draftable) after all. and VA i drafted last turn which is why it's sad and has an actual unworked plains mill. some of these border tiles are third-ring to the mjmd city and thus probably unrecoverable, but the town and the two improved plains hills are all at around 40% zulu, so i'll probably work artists until we have them back and then switch over to merchants. and idk if ouch will stay on that very suspect culture build.... but i'd like to invest 50 hammers to take it to third-ring borders for defensive purposes. if ginger invades here they will surely crack a border city and i do NOT want a location this central and strategically significant to suddenly relinquish all our tiles that we need to mount a recapture attempt (not to mention it would be 1-turnable by 2-movers if both the border cities fell
)
OKAyyy my hand huts (and my back hurts, sitting upright without a chair to type this all out....) and there's still an actual turn to play? oh welllllll
see yall tomorrow for more contemplation of the imminence of our doom (but we got some nice screenshots out of semi-surviving this long, wouldn't you say)
as long as we do NOT get a merchant from this one (which should be at most a 10% chance by the time we finish) we can then run through the last GP with 8 specialists for a 16 turn timing
