Luddite/Pindicator

[luddite]

Our economy is really limping along right now, breakeven at 30% research, +7 gold at 0%. Since Fierce doesn't even have sailing yet, I think we're gonna hold off on the islands for a while, and concentrate on developing the better locations near our capital.

[pindicator]

New save is in - there weren't any big decisions to be made so I went ahead and played it.

Some news on the inter-turn



That's mackoti's from the Great Lighthouse. Remember that they can enter borders even without an Open Borders deal. So is it worth war if he tries to move it in our borders?

I found a way to double our gpt. Long Goodbye was working the grass hill instead of the gold tile, so I put that guy back to work. We can grab writing in 4 turns at 40%, -8gpt. This also isn't losing a beaker to rounding. (I love the F2 screen for this; just count up gold + beakers and go through the slider to find what percentages lose rounding to gold. This turn it was multiples of 20% that were good.)

Speaking of expenses:



#1 culprit is cities. And what do we plan on doing about it? Found more cities of course! Take that, maintenance :neenernee

Settler came out of Raw Deal, and moved 1 tile NE so NoSpace wouldn't have eyes on it this turn. It can still make the move to the tile 3E next turn. Guess I could have just moved it to the south instead, but it gets there either way.



I figure camping the deer is top priority so one of those workers can help get that going. The one that chopped can set more cottages for the new town to grow onto. Or it can go help out The Villian do the same.

We are jumping a bit out of order with our naming scheme for the next city. Since we've been calling it '3E' for so long, I joked we should name it that. Luddite had an even better idea - we'll name it T3 / Terminator 3. Guess we'll have to get 1 and 2 down soon too. Don't worry, settlers are in production!!!

Everything else was done by the signs. Our western scouting work boat has turned south. I'm starting to wonder if that peak off Fierce's north shore aids as a bridge to a central island. It connects us and Sian, so why not connect via the center as well? Is that worth another wb out of Happy Anniv?

Here's an empire shot to part on

[luddite]

Wow, good catch on the gold! I completely missed that, last turn. Stupid AI, taking away our best tiles.

I really don't think it's worth declaring war on mackoti just to kill his great merchant. But we'll see

I'm starting to wonder if we might have completely misinterpreted the shape of the map. I thought it was a ring shape, but our work boat in the west has hit open ocean. Maybe it's actually more like a snake?

[pindicator]

Gotta admit, I am stumped on the map shape as well. I was originally thinking 6-pointed star, but then why are we seeing Sian's borders to our SE? He would be straight E of us in that situation.

Are we playing a torroidal map? Do you know of any tricks to tell? That would be the easiest way to get the most civs bordering each other, but I don't think city maintenance has been all that pricey.

[luddite]

No way this is toroidal- with emperor difficulty, we'd be suffering a lot more from toroidal maintenance right now.

Here's my current guess for what the map might look like, drawn with my awesome MSpaint skills:

[pindicator]

Heh, that's about as awesome as the attempts I made with a 6-sided star

By the way, save's up!

Edit: I'm going to wait for you to take a look before playing. I've messed with micro and sliders, but not moved anything yet. Some of the things I see...

• We can get Writing next turn at 90% with micro.
  
• Do we whip the granary in Cactus Jack? Thinking yes.
  
• Granary next in Villain? Do we whip it next turn? Again, thinking yes.
  
• A barb warrior has come out of Polynesian. Hopefully he takes out NoSpace's scout for us, but after that we're going to need some defense in our core. Do we get an Impi / Axe out of the capital ahead of the settler? The cap is also the only place with an ikhanda, so +3 exp gets us closer to level 3. (Does an Impi get lower odds to the point he'll gain more exp per battle? I think an axe would only get 1exp per battle, so I'm leaning towards having an impi go up there to farm. But if an impi also only gets 1exp then might as well go with the axe.)
  
• what do we do with the workers around Raw Deal? Both of them improve T3?
  
• finishing the ikhanda in HappyAnniv will get a .79g savings. So probably will save us 1gpt. It can wait if there's something more pressing (like another wb scout!)
  

[luddite]

Wow, here's an interesting fact I just realized. Right now, the Rival Best food yield is 102, and the Rival Average is 66. Ours is 77. So if you multiply 77*5, subtract NS7's 102, and divide by 4, the rival average of everyone else is only 57. That's... quite a difference.

Mackoti has the great lighthouse to help him out, so maybe he can still catch up? But it seems like everyone else is already out of the running for this game.

[pindicator]

Well, looks like Luddite and I started playing the save at the same time... I won by merit of sending it off first. Yikes...

Anyway, it's done now, so here's what I did:

NoSpace offered OB - I declined.

Settled our new city, T3:



Actually surprised myself with the micro on this, that working the unimproved deer tile is the best way to grow and get the work boat out. I tried stealing the copper tile and the flood plains as variations, but the deer tile gets us growing to size 3 the fastest. Work boat will be done EOT T63, and then fish will be hooked up to time growth to size 2 on T65. Size 3 on T67.

Working the copper gets us the work boat faster (T62) and we grow to size 3 on T67 also. So since it's a tie, let the capital keep its tiles.

And then we did some exploring:

Sian's lands



Fierce's capital

[luddite]

I like that we've finally settled a city where... we originally started.

[luddite]

So NS7 settled 3 cities this turn, while also finishing the Hanging Gardens. Neat.

I knew we didn't have a chance to get that wonder, since we went for land grab and iron working, but I really wish that one of the other teams could have stepped up and built it. Like, say, the industrious leader with only 4 cities. Or Mackoti, who's a runaway first in GNP. Oh well.

They offered us open borders again, this time with an added bonus of rice. Again I refused. If they ask again we're going to demand a city as part of the deal.