[PB72 SPOILERS] Aetryn learns humility

[Commodore]

Sounds like you lucked out there...harsh to whip that much pop just to gain unhappy faces elsewhere. But all's well that ends well.

[Mjmd]

I can't for the life of me figure out how HG hung around until T123..... The gold trade after made it go from medium to very good though.

[aetryn]

Sounds like you lucked out there...harsh to whip that much pop just to gain unhappy faces elsewhere. But all's well that ends well.

Pretty much. It would have been a 4 pop whip without the stone, turned into a 3 pop whip with the stone. Obviously HG itself replaces one of those automatically, and a lot of the new cities really appreciated the immediate injection of someone to whip for a Mint or Granary, but it really did not help the core or the economy. Beyond the whipped population, the cost of all the forests around Diligence, a long whip timer there, and delayed other infrastructure/build queues were also in play.

Ultimately, the Golden Age would still have gotten most of those people working because I was going to gain 3 happy (well, one wasn't from the Golden Age but from the wines that will coincidentally be hooked in the same turn). But it got them working 3 turns earlier, helping me stock up gold for the GA and definitely pushed Calendar down the list of things I need to tech immediately. And it also gave me more headroom to grow into even more productivity during the Golden Age, which is a good thing as I don't really want to be whipping too much when yields are up.

There was also some denial value here, as I didn't really want either Grenline or Bing to get this.

[aetryn]

T128-130: A Golden Age Begins

The clash between the rival claimants Khons Tahnteen and Yambo Bakr reached its head as they and their followers marched against each other in the hills outside of Humility. On the night before battle was to be joined, Khons had a strange dream, in which he saw a winged figure with a cross encircled by the words "In this sign you shall conquer".  Inspired, he had his soldiers paint the cross into their shields before they went into battle the next day, and won overwhelmingly. In the aftermath of the battle he asked the scholars of Humility what the sign meant and they told him it was the symbol of the new religion that was spreading throughout the empire. Khons converted to Christianity and proclaimed it the official religion of the Malian Empire. Other faiths were still welcomed in Maliland, and there would be no persecution of the Buddhists in Fortitude and Diligence, but one faith was primary. Khons also adopted new principles of Mali social thought and proclaimed he would pass rulership of the empire to his firstborn son, to avoid future succession conflicts, thus establishing the First Malian Monarchy. All Maliland celebrated the rule of Khons, who was a wise an benevolent king, and cities throughout the empire flourished. Meanwhile, as the Christians focused on missionary endeavors to east and west, they slowly became more organized as a hierarchy organized around the first Holy Father. In Humility, Khons undertook the construction of a great palace for the Holy Father to inhaibt...

---

Socrates asks, "What is a Golden Age?"



And here are the civic swaps:



I have a long list of buildings to produce, especially if I'm heading down the monk line and going for Apostolic Palace (which I am!) and University of Sankore (hopefully!). Organized Religion should speed that up quite a bit. Meanwhile Monarchy will help with happiness everywhere and I can always produce pretty cheap Skirmishers for Military Police if I need more happiness in one specific city. I currently have nothing to put into Legal, but will sort that out before the Golden Age ends.

Look at all those tasty, tasty yields:



The tech path will be: one turn break-even on Iron Working, one turn researching Construction on gold banked, one turn saving for Feudalism, two turns researching Feudalism. That leaves three turns left to save gold and probably get one more tech, which I haven't fully determined yet but is likely to either be Calendar or Code of Laws. Meanwhile, missionary spread in Hope cuts Moai completion time to 2 turns, meaning I get it for most of the golden age. I'm trying to keep to very limited whipping, but have to whip the unimproved tiles off the capital to get Apostolic Palace started. Most other cities will wait out the golden age and then get whipped then.

The next turn iron is revealed and...


I did an impressive job missing that tile with every city, but at least it's in culture. This is close to the frontier but reasonable secure behind mountains. I suppose I could shift the planned site of City 14 one tile south to pick it up, but that makes it impossible to work marble (and the city could no longer share the copper from Fortitude when it isn't needed there).



Well, it's in a city, but not sure that's worth destroying a hamlet for. It might just be a slightly boosted town in the end. If an emergency arises and my other iron is cut, I could always connect it then.

Ridiculous golden age demographics:



And I understand that I'm required by statute to provide a picture of a Financial Moai golden age city with Colossus, so here you go:



This. This is why I settled this city over more contested land. 56 gold and it doesn't even have a market yet, or all its tiles. I mean, it's going to be pretty good even NOT in a Golden Age, but it's just absurd here, especially when it grows 3 more times and can work all those silver tiles. Compare Temperance which barely has 6 good tiles to work or other cities that have required tons of worker labor. Not this place. Mine some silvers, send the workers elsewhere and rake in the commerce.

Next time I'll take a look at the overall game state since I have mostly been focused on my own empire for a while, and consider whether I may have just put a target on my back by going Hanging Gardens into Golden Age.

[Commodore]

Like the Constantine reference.

I did an impressive job missing that tile with every city, but at least it's in culture. This is close to the frontier but reasonable secure behind mountains. I suppose I could shift the planned site of City 14 one tile south to pick it up, but that makes it impossible to work marble (and the city could no longer share the copper from Fortitude when it isn't needed there).

Don't you prefer 2/3/1 tiles to 0/4/2?

[aetryn]

Like the Constantine reference.

I did an impressive job missing that tile with every city, but at least it's in culture. This is close to the frontier but reasonable secure behind mountains. I suppose I could shift the planned site of City 14 one tile south to pick it up, but that makes it impossible to work marble (and the city could no longer share the copper from Fortitude when it isn't needed there).

Don't you prefer 2/3/1 tiles to 0/4/2?

Thanks! Some of this is really inspired by reading some of your earlier threads, especially the epic Generican Ballistaphant war with Scoopin back in the day, so it's especially nice that you caught this!

And yes, I do prefer 2/3/1 tiles. Sometimes I just post half-formed thoughts before thinking them all the way through.

[aetryn]

Turn 131-132: Geopolitics with Bacon on it

Four interesting things happened in the wider world in these turns (well, one of them was in T130, but it fit better to talk about it here).

First, Bing finished Mausoleum and Great Lighthouse on the same turn. I forgot to take a picture of this so no screenshot. There wasn't much we could do about Mausoleum. He was miles ahead of everyone else to Calendar (and is still the only one that has it), and he had marble. I would have had to dodge Currency to threaten him on this and it just didn't make sense to do so. Great Lighthouse is a shame because I like coastal sites with Colossus and would have liked to have gotten this, and was partially building it in Faith, but I didn't prioritize it and you have to expect not to get wonders you don't prioritize.  Bing's demographics are still well above anyone else (well, outside of a Golden Age) and he now gets extra length on his Golden Ages, so this is moderately threatening. I'm not entirely sure I actually mind Bing continuing to be threatening at this point, however, which I'll discuss a bit later when I look at all the players.

Next up, the Byzantines are jealous of my Golden Age and launch one of their own:



Representation is from Pyramids, of course, but Serfdom is an... interesting choice. Maybe it's just to maximize GA commerce and he intends to switch off to Slavery before it ends. But even that seems like an odd choice because of, well...

Third, Greenline sent me my first ever cryptic RB AI diplo request. Okay, it's not really all that cryptic as these things go - 10 gold for 10 gold is an obvious countdown timer. But what is it a countdown timer to? Is he saying he wants his stone back in 10 turns? Is he going to war in 10 turns? Who with? Then I take a look at the tech screen:


One person has Horseback Riding, Feudalism, and Machinery. Gee, I wonder what Byzantium might want with those techs. It's a mystery! 
The 10 turn timer is probably a cataphract attack, or just a huge pile of cataphracts being built and presumably he wants to warn me.
There's one small problem with this interpretation though - if he has Feudalism, why didn't he switch to Vassalage to build them with more exp? (Though maybe with stables that isn't needed? Still seems like an odd choice) Even more so, why isn't he in Slavery to whip some of them? I suspect it's actually Bing or Xist that currently has Feudalism and Greenline is just a little bit farther away, so he can change back to slavery at the end of the GA and then produce the Cataphract surge.

Fourth, Xist planted this city:



Okay, it claims a fish but WHY here and not 2 squares south? MJMD thinks this is a hyperaggressive plant that tips off an upcoming invasion along this vector, and I don't necessarily disagree, but Xist has done enough odd things to grab territory that I think this might have just been a desire not to cede any more land to my culture. I'm not going to assume that - I'm going to prepare for an attack here (in fact, I somewhat already had by building Walls and stocking up a garrison in spite of advice NOT to build walls here, because Xist had done enough aggressive things that I wanted a minimum amount of defense in an exposed border city). But I'm also not going to assume war and make the first move when, at the moment, this is just a potential future threat (and Xist continues to take fish for fish and just gave me a very useful gold for silver trade). Is this a diabolical plot by Xist to attack? Or just a strange way of valuing territory and city sites?

That's it for news, so let's look at game state.

Me: I'll feeling okay about my chances at this point. I'm not in the lead. IMP is nearly, but not quite spent as I still have 5-7 cities to settle and land to move into - and that in itself is good news as it appears Xist is in filler mode and Bing hasn't planted a city in a long while. My east border isn't quite as ridiculously secure as my west border - there is a one tile path where someone could invade - but that one tile path is convoluted and easy to see an attack coming a mile away and the person on the other end is Greenline, who has been my best neighbor so far. When I settle city #16, I'll seal off my end of this and then have a bunch of (poor) backline land to fill in. But land is still land, and if I'm still getting value out of expanding that's pretty good. And FIN is still accelerating and will always be a major advantage. My unique unit is nearly spent, but my unique building will always be passively adding gold every time I'm saving, and it's not like I'm NOT going to build them everywhere at this point with two metal luxuries to increase. So I think I have a lot of room to continue to improve my relative standing. I'm not the favorite, and I have to navigate the final part of the era of Praetorians and all of the era of Cataphracts without getting run over. But I think I have a decent chance.

Where do I go from here? Try to avoid getting attacked, settle the rest of my land, look spiky, defend well, and try to fast-forward the game past the era of my opponent's Unique Units. This is the gameplan I started from, and I don't see why I would change it yet.

Bing: Highest demographics, most cities (for now), and in any case his cities are very mature and he has a lot of calendar luxuries connected (3, last I counted). And he just built one of the really good wonders in the Mausoleum. On the one hand, he's threatening to increase his lead even further, but is he at the point of running away with the game? He's largely stopped expanding, and doesn't have a lot of obvious sites left to take. He was on 15 when I was on like 9 cities, and now he's still on 15 and I'm about to found 14 and 15 in the next few turns. Creative is basically done at this point, so he needs to go to war to exploit Aggressive. But it looks a lot like he's missed any chance to attack Greenline before Cataphracts, and attacking Xist with Greenline amassing Cataphracts seems like it would be suicidal. Bing and I don't share a border, so he's extremely unlikely to attack me. So on the other hand I kind of like him continuing to be strong and lead the game. It makes him an appealing dogpile target while I sit over here and build crappy-ish Eastern Waste cities and tech. I will probably regret this when he runs away with the game and wins, and I still think he's the favorite. But I thought he was the overwhelming favorite when he had 50% more cities than the next person and Currency already in hand, and while he's done well to grab Calendar and MoM, I just kind of feel he's failed to really exploit his advantage here. I accidentally kept Espionage on Bing for a very long time and can see his tech. He just finished Monarchy and is currently heading to Construction.

Where does Bing go from here? I'd assume he tries to leverage his golden age advantage to econ ahead to key techs first and maintain his dominance. Yesterday I would have said he and Xist could combine to attack Greenline, but with Cataphracts on deck it seems like it's too late for that play. Bing is probably my most likely threat for University of Sankore because of his tech rate, access to stone, and seeming desire to just sit there and develop really big cities. If I'm misreading the tech situation and in fact Bing is the one heading to Knights and NOT Greenline, which seems borderline crazy, then his prospects look much better. Taking some of those nice Greenline cities on his border looks pretty good in that case. Attacking Xist looks less clear, though Xist is clearly in last place and would normally be the obvious target, except that Praets are still pretty strong. But I'm pretty sure based on tech visibility and rational game strategy that Greenline is the one on the Knight path.

What do I do about Bing? Well, there's basically nothing realistically I CAN do, unless he gets to the point where it must be dogpile-or-he-wins. I couldn't hold any territory I took from him, so any war I fought with him would just be destructive and a waste of my resources. I think I try to just use what seems to be a land space advantage and the long-term advantage of FIN and outscale him.

Greenline: Demos are competitive and probably generally just slightly ahead of me, but we've been trading small food and gold and production leads back and forth for the last 30 turns, so I think we're basically tied. Had a bit of a weird period where he was way behind on military but has largely fixed that, and his early Monarchy/religion set up meant his core cities are big - though mine are finally catching up. He just pushed out to 14 cities ahead of me, and definitely has room for some more cities, though some of them would be pretty useless tundra cities. Greenline and  I theoretically have a very long border together all along the edge of the western valley. But that border is entirely sealed with impassable mountains. So it's basically a TINY border at the threeway junction of Temperance, Mediolanum, and Huckleberry Finn. I like Greenline's game so far, and honestly I like his name scheme. He's about to enter his power era where his unique unit is dominant. And he sent me a warning countdown. Which, along with the total lack of espionage spending, suggests that he's NOT planning on invading me. Which is good! I don't want to deal with Cataphracts, go wreck Bing or something. Given his incoming power spike and Bing's falling back to the pack just a bit, I think Greenline has almost as good of odds as Bing at ending up on top. If he doesn't leverage his UU to do something interesting, I think he fades somewhat as the game goes longer. Expansive is basically done at this point, and Protective will get increasingly overshadowed when the city count stops going up.

Where does Greenline go from here? He appears to still have some land to settle, but he's running out of the quality stuff. The obvious thing to do is go invade someone. He has two short borders with Bing and a tiny border with Xist (right where mine is), so he isn't very vulnerable to counterattacks. The scary thing is if he just rolls over Bing, takes all that good green land down in the south, and becomes economically unstoppable. If that happens, I pretty much have to attack him. Hopefully it won't happen. Bing is the most veteran in this game, he ought to be able to handle defense given the demo lead he's had for 50 turns. But you never know. Could Greenline attack Xist? It's possible - Greenline moved his capital east to be more central, so despite Xist being quite far from his starting cities, it's not absurd for him to contemplate taking and holding that territory. Is it reasonable to attack Xist and still defend against Bing? I'm a bit more dubious about that but given his borders are quite short, it's possible. It's even possible that's why he's given me a timer message in the first place - as in "Hey, this would be your chance to jump in and get some spoils against Xist".

What do I do about Greenline? I'd like to continue to work together with him for as long as possible. That might not be very long if he goes ham with Cataphracts. But otherwise, he's been helpful with trades, totally non-aggressive toward me, and at the moment Xist with his long border is a much bigger threat.

Xist: Xist's demographics have been bad since the First Roman War. He's consistently been behind in city count. He chose really odd placements that ignored working triple gold for a very long time in favor of seizing territory. He's finally up to 12 now, but some of his choices are really fillers at this point and he has NO further land to expand to, so I don't see how he keeps up through peaceful expansion. He's the only one with no wonders built - not even his shrine. His religion isn't even very well spread. And yet, he continues to make peaceful sounds towards me, offering me a very, very helpful gold trade. And he has a very large number of Praetorians, which are still very threatening units - though not enough to make him above third in military, though admittedly everyone that isn't me is very closely packed together. (I'll put a Power demos charts from a couple turns back at the end of the post). At this point Xist borders everyone. Me with a very long border from Temperance to Patience to Diligence to Generosity. Greenline just slightly in the west, and Bing in both the east and west.

I think Xist had the worst starting position and then made it worse with his city choices. He capital was slammed up against the edge of the map, making "halfway between my capital and his" well south of the equator of this map. He has a lot of mountainous terrain and seas limiting where he can go. My city of Prudence really did cramp him a lot, forcing him to expand awkwardly east and west. And while he definitely has a few good river cities, a lot of his land is really a lot less green than I expect for the bottom third of this map script (I suspect Bing's land is much better). But he also seems to my unpracticed analysis to not have made the best of his situation. Clashing with me some was probably inevitable, but he could have avoided settling the ridiculously in your face site, and might have EVEN got away with that if he hadn't continue to harass me to the point where I got fed up and attacked him. Then he marched a bunch of axes around in my lands for several turns accomplishing nothing more than one road pillage, losing one of them. He probably HAS to settle Mediolanum when he did in order to not get blocked there, so that one's kind of okay. But he then settled a very farflung city west up against Bing and Greenline that was much worse than sites I could see at the time with multiple foods, and clearly worse than multiple golds. And when he did settle the gold, he settled it with an isolated city without enough worker support that only claimed one of the three golds, took forever to hook it up at all and even longer to get the rest of his gold hooked up.  I think if I had been in this position I would have ceded the location of Mediolanum and gone all out for controlling the gold area, used the gold to power me to key economic techs so I could support large-scale aggressive conquest,  and then taken the Mediolanum and Prudence sites for myself militarily (and ignored points farther west). I might not have done it very well, but I think you pick Rome for a timing attack with Praetorians. Instead he attacked early, valued claiming land above taking the best city sites, crashed his economy and needed to take time off to develop, and consequently only has a couple more weeks before Praetorians stop mattering much.

Where does Xist go from here? I think Xist has to do something soon or he's just going to fall farther back as he runs out of city sites and his neighbors continue to advance into the Medieval era. I think he has 4 ways back into this game:

1. I do something really stupid and leave myself open, and he runs me over. This is totally possible.
   
2. He teams up with Greenline to dogpile me. This would be very scary and probably not survivable as getting both War Elephants and Maces would be hard for me to do in time. Fortunately, I can't imagine why Greenline would send me a timer warning me about this, so I don't think this is immediately on the table. Might be later, though.
   
3. He teams up with Greenline to dogpile Bing. I think he mostly gets scraps from Bing, and is probably still land constrained, but if he gets enough good cities he can match his neighbors' continuing economic development and be strong enough to be in the mix.
   
4. He teams up with Bing to dogpile Greenline. Awkward, because Greenline's cities are far from Xist's capital, but doable. This is what I kind of expected to happen as Bing tried to head off the future emergence of Cataphracts. But I think the window is closing fast for this scenario, at least for the immediate future.
   

What do I do about Xist? For the moment, continue to be wary, make sure my defenses along the border are sound, flash him a catapult so he knows I'm ready to use them if he attacks. I don't need to take him out right now, and don't even really want to even in the closing era of Praetorians. Of course, if Greenline attacks him on the west I'll kill his new hill plant near Generosity and plant a city of my own 2 south where he should have put it. But for the most part I'm content to wait until I have settled all the land I have open before I invest a lot of resources in war.

Final thoughts: I think the map has surprised some of the players (it certainly surprised me!) People who have done Single player on this map probably expected the difficult border situations more than I did, but the expenses of running cities kind of took us by surprise and led us to crater our economies too early, except for Bing. This happened at a particularly unfortunate time for Xist right during his power spike. I'm enjoying playing the game at this point, but we'll see how I feel if it turns out I'm wrong and Xist Scenario 2 is on the table, and Greenline just believes in notifying people of their onrushing doom.

Final Final Thoughts: This is just my random thoughts. I can't see into my opponents' heads, and I'm guessing about their motivations and skills. It's possible Xist had a cunning plan that didn't work out and I just couldn't see it.  This is my first multiplayer game, so what do I really know about things anyway? But the fun of playing these in public is to see people's thoughts, so despite the fact that 90% of my thoughts are probably trash, here they are. No offense meant to anyone playing in this game.

Power demos:
 

[Commodore]

It feels trite to just continue to say "great update", but...Great Update

[Mjmd]

So I promised Aetryn I would talk about GP planning / usage so other folk could chime in. Aetryn has the problem of having a very opinionated ded lurker, so good to have some other views. Obviously he still ignores me sometimes, which is good honestly (although yes I still don't like all the walls).

Aetryn had been planning on next prophet from Humility going to a shrine, which long term would be pretty good. Instead I had him throw an engineer into the mix and told him to go "full steam ahead" toward second GA. I know some people try to set up later game GAs and if you are already ahead those can be pretty good, but in general I like more GAs sooner to get the snow ball rolling and keep it rolling.

Now my next piece here is for non phil. Generally you CAN* produce one early great person to do with as you wish. Academy, trade mission, GE wonder build, bulb, ect. Aetryn obviously produced a early great prophet, but due to lack of religion chose to help snowball by bulbing theology and getting religion online for happiness, org, and AP. IF had gotten one of the early 3 I think a shrine would have been fine with this, but not how the game played.

AFTER / IF first early great person the next imperative is to both switch civics (HR, org, vassalage being normal ones) and to get through as many juicy parts of the classical tech tree as you can. Now what should timing after the first one? IF you are going conquering can wait as you want to integrate that new territory beforehand. But if you are just teching away you want to really push that vector, so in my view you want that second one as fast as possible. Pushing toward lib / nationalism (two main but not exclusive targets, depends on competition). Also, get to build lots of org boosted buildings if you aren't at war. Have I mentioned I love putting GA hammers through org religion yet?

Now another point of contention is "should you run caste / pacifism". Or at least that was an Aetryn question. I personally HATE doing this. I've done it once, EVER, but it was only because I failed a 9% GP check. Basically there are two reason for doing this in my mind. You a really are trying to push GA into GA or you didn't plan very well (or again you got unlucky). While I like a fast GA into GA I'm usually not convinced its smart to be in THAT much of a hurry. Again timing I like my first GA usually there is a little expansion left to go / city growth, so it doesn't harm you to wait a little bit for that next GA. Also, you can do quite a bit with good planning. Sure it helps to have wonders, but they aren't required for this. Aetryn is currently running an engineer in Diligence. This isn't for his 2nd GA, it is for his 3rd (or possibly some wonder, but good to start now in any case).

[aetryn]

So I promised Aetryn I would talk about GP planning / usage so other folk could chime in. Aetryn has the problem of having a very opinionated ded lurker, so good to have some other views. Obviously he still ignores me sometimes, which is good honestly (although yes I still don't like all the walls).

Aetryn had been planning on next prophet from Humility going to a shrine, which long term would be pretty good. Instead I had him throw an engineer into the mix and told him to go "full steam ahead" toward second GA. I know some people try to set up later game GAs and if you are already ahead those can be pretty good, but in general I like more GAs sooner to get the snow ball rolling and keep it rolling.

Now my next piece here is for non phil. Generally you CAN* produce one early great person to do with as you wish. Academy, trade mission, GE wonder build, bulb, ect. Aetryn obviously produced a early great prophet, but due to lack of religion chose to help snowball by bulbing theology and getting religion online for happiness, org, and AP. IF had gotten one of the early 3 I think a shrine would have been fine with this, but not how the game played.

AFTER / IF first early great person the next imperative is to both switch civics (HR, org, vassalage being normal ones) and to get through as many juicy parts of the classical tech tree as you can. Now what should timing after the first one? IF you are going conquering can wait as you want to integrate that new territory beforehand. But if you are just teching away you want to really push that vector, so in my view you want that second one as fast as possible. Pushing toward lib / nationalism (two main but not exclusive targets, depends on competition). Also, get to build lots of org boosted buildings if you aren't at war. Have I mentioned I love putting GA hammers through org religion yet?

Now another point of contention is "should you run caste / pacifism". Or at least that was an Aetryn question. I personally HATE doing this. I've done it once, EVER, but it was only because I failed a 9% GP check. Basically there are two reason for doing this in my mind. You a really are trying to push GA into GA or you didn't plan very well (or again you got unlucky). While I like a fast GA into GA I'm usually not convinced its smart to be in THAT much of a hurry. Again timing I like my first GA usually there is a little expansion left to go / city growth, so it doesn't harm you to wait a little bit for that next GA. Also, you can do quite a bit with good planning. Sure it helps to have wonders, but they aren't required for this. Aetryn is currently running an engineer in Diligence. This isn't for his 2nd GA, it is for his 3rd (or possibly some wonder, but good to start now in any case).

What of this changes for Spiritual leaders, who don't need the early golden age to get civics online?