[SPOILER] And now for something completely different: DaveV is Hannah

[Rusten]

Looks like a pretty nice capital.

Yes, with the trees it's a coniferous cornucopia. An evergreen El Dorado. A tree-lined treasure trove. A fat fir-coned future for the financiers.

Taken from my contribution to the theme and suggestion if it ever goes as far as «R». Don't know much about this mod, but had to sign in to express my love for the theme.

[DaveV]

I didn't have anything in mind for R, but it's possible I'll reach that number of cities. Noted.

Turn 3, more exploration, border pop.



That's a lot of jungle. Good thing I'll be working a lot of water tiles.

[DaveV]

Fast turnaround, so we get a morning turn. It starts with my first event of the game:



There are a *lot* of random events in this mod. Some of them are really helpful, some of them are painful. This particular one, as far as I can tell, is only for flavor and has no impact on the game. That's better than one of the bad events, at least.

More exploration forces me to go with north and south views:

[DaveV]

Today we played a blitz session with all four players online at the same time. I was expecting to knock out about a dozen turns, but we played 27! The game is well underway now, at the cost of my Saturday afternoon. I had several more events:



Civilizations have a starting alignment in this mod: Good, Neutral, or Evil. You can see the current alignment for each civ on the scoreboard. This event is for Evil civs; there is a corresponding event for Good civs, but none for Neutrals, making this a null event. Had I been evil, the first option would have let me pay 50 gold for a great prophet (!), and the second would have given me 40 beakers.



The first option is only available if I have Octopus Overlords as my state religion, and gives 20 turns of +1 happiness. Temporary happiness is very situational, and I almost always take the free money even if the first option is available (which it wasn't here).



Free beakers, yay! There are bad events, too, I've just been lucky so far.



More free money. The first option is only available to the Illian civ, who worship the god of Winter.

Most civs follow the BtS strategy of cranking out a worker first, while researching the techs needed to improve your surroundings. For the Lanun, it's better to go Fishing first and crank out some workboats. I was just playing in my sandbox, until turn 25 when Aurorarcher appeared out of the fog:



Combat promotions are twice as effective in EitB as in BtS, so his combat I warrior has a +20% bonus. This makes his survival in the wild a little more likely, although he can still lose to a griffon or tiger (strength 4, move 2) if he's on flatland or gets a bad roll on defensive terrain, and he still has to watch out for scorpions and spiders (strength 5, 1 first strike) and bears (strength 5, no first strike). I sent my units scampering back to my borders after turn 5 to try to avoid the animals, who spawn on turn 6.

We danced around a little; he didn't want to move into a 2 vs. 1 situation, where I probably could have killed him. He finally wandered back into the fog to the northwest.

You can see the fruits of my fishing boats: netted fish, and two pirate coves. Pirate coves are an improvement that can be built by fishing boats; the boat is consumed just like when it nets a seafood. Pirate coves upgrade like cottages, with two upgrades available: coves start at +2 commerce and upgrade to harbors in 6 turns; pirate harbors are +1/+1/+3, and upgrade to pirate ports in 13 turns; pirate ports are +2/+2/+4, which is a really nice tile. Pirate coves can't be built on top of seafood, can only be built on coastal tiles, and must be three tiles apart. Optimizing pirate cove placement is a cute little minigame, and frequently determines the best city sites.

Fast forward to the present:



My two coves have upgraded to harbors, and have 6 and 9 turns to go before they're ports. I built a worker after the workboats; he's finished farming the rice and is working on a plantation for the cotton. Building all those workboats has put me behind the progress of the other civs, at least two of whom have planted a second city. That means the barbs will be showing up soon.

Graphs and other data:

[Jabah]

There is /was  a dream lanun city with 4 coves + 2 seafood minimum on th island  (middle of south row) with enough land to get production as  well. One cove is invalidated by the existing ones and you need sailing to go there but that looks great.

[DaveV]

@Jabah - I see what you're talking about, but I'm going to do my best to put down coves rather than wait for some future super city.

In fact, I decided to wait a couple turns to complete my settler in case copper pops up nearby. Another FFH thing is weapon upgrades: if I can build a city to link up copper and research Bronze Working, all my warriors will automatically receive a Bronze Weapons promotion, which gives them +1 combat strength. This is very useful against the barbs, and against Aurorarcher if he gets frisky.

[Jabah]

Yes, it is definitively not next city
But it could be a strong GPP city (if such thing exists in competitive FFH MP) down the road.
Plus of course being on another landmass for all the nice trade routes.

[DaveV]

The turn pace continues to be very good. I finished mining, and searched for copper. Drum roll:



Nice, right in my dotmap. The settler will head to the tile SW of copper.

[DaveV]

After several turns in transit, my settler reached its destination and founded my second city, on the same turn Aurorarcher established his third. I guess I am a bit behind the curve here.



Demographics still look decent, though. If I can survive long enough, I should be able to leverage my GNP advantage.



On the city name: I considered The Bishop and Blackmail, but had to go with the faculty members of the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo. I couldn't find this sketch on the official Monty Python channel, so here's a bootleg version:

[DaveV]

The best thing about the Bruces sketch is something that wasn't in the TV show, but was added later for a record album (yes, this show is from a long time ago).