[pb74 spoilers] Miguelito and Ginger bring about the end of the world

[Mjmd]

Played. You have your first neighbor. No scout in sight.

[yuris125]

Woah I didn't realise your pace the turn wasn't here when I went to bed, thought I would get it after finishing work commitments

[Miguelito]

thanks again yuris and Mjmd!



... just hoping no scout pops up to snatch it from me




To my surprise, doing the pig first is strictly better - we lose 2f to the second 5f tile coming up a turn later, but gain 2h from working the improved pig at size one, and then 3f from working pig pasture and unimproved rice vs ui pig and rice farm at size two. And we don't even lose a worker turn, because he can spend the turn moving on the first turn of cottaging, and that cottage gets finished before the worker starts preparing city 2.

The big question still is, do we put 15h into a warrior, or go all in naked and put everything into granary? For now granary is ok, I can switch to warrior yet - no, actually starting the warrior later means we miss out on scouting, and I do think going without is folly, so I'll log in and change it now.

[Miguelito]

we got the hut, but only a map out of it, which of course is always a bit underwhelming. Not useless by any means though. Thescout then found our horse!
Really tough choice at least in my view now between orange and blue dot.

Orange has

• lovely worker micro with easy instant trade connection
  
• pig sharing (it will almost certainly get shared by yellow later on though)
  
• 1 more shared grassland cottage
  

Blue

• has horse first ring, and we're Egypt!
  
• has a brown city square
  
• claims slightly better towards the west
  
  

The western horse is interesting. It might be somebody's (metal?). If not, we should try to claim the gems; in a perfect world we'd manage a city on the plains hill between gems and cow

[Miguelito]

Magic Science with Willem of Mali found us. That's a strong combo, and MS has downs but also definitely ups.
metal is a player that I don't mind neighbouring at all, but João might make things difficult... although if he just settles far and wide he might end up vulnerable to WCs? Generally Civforum players tend to be cautious not to get caught in ancient era though....

Ginger's commentary:

Magic Science is a bit of a troll
He writes a ton of reporting genuinely intended but then none of that results in coherent decision making
Good neighbor roll
It’s not Comm or Amica

Planning wise we're set on the first ring horse city, which means we sadly the t31 granary isn't really feasible because we need the second worker.

[Miguelito]

Go Lions!
(nah, he still has a move this turn)



Met GKC in the west. We really can't complain about the neighbourhood so far, none of the scary names. And this area is crazy lush, need to grab, then fill the south.

[Miguelito]

sadface


so, just how hard are we going to push with those WCs? I can hardly think of these gems being worth a death war this early, but it hurts.

[Miguelito]

WANT



"rather" unlikely to happen though


also....


if he has to get an event like that, probably the best for us to happen. Never been a fan of short-/long-/crossbows anyway

[Miguelito]

5 beakers short of getting BW in 5 turns (as was planned as per my - bugged - spreadsheet). Would some of the Mining starters please research it already so we can get KTB, or is that too much to ask? Is it because they were too incompetent to pop a 2nd column tech from a hut ?

[Miguelito]

metal got BW eventually, but no one else, so we whipped a turn late, on t32
It is not too bad - the 2nd city comes a turn later, but the rice farm not, nor the second worker, and ultimately neither both granaries (t41 & 46); in fact the capital spends a turn less stalling growth at size two and neglecting the cottage.
Somewhat surprisingly we are the 2nd to whip at all, after Commodore t28, and also only three players have founded second cities (Comm, pindi, and GT, none of which are Imp...). If we found on the same turn as metal with João or faster I'll call it a win, even though he will surely be faster to three, with us having whipped already.

There's good stuff in the NW:


The best thing about is that I have not seen any Mali borders yet . So that seems a more worthwhile claim than pinkdotting for gems.

dotmapping is still unfinished:


We're founding blue horse in 2 turns. I had entertained the idea of some culture bomb on the sheep blue dot, but with copper the yellow one has higher priority. There is that one unused grassland though - it can be a joyless filler much later, but I'd probably want to move either of those dots to work it - moving yellow makes claiming the gold more complicated, not only because it would be only in the next city's BFC, but also because a hill plant e.g. on the orange dot would be more disconnected... moving blue loses the plains hill plant and the lovely land claim towards metal, but maybe that would actually make for a sustainable border - but do we want that?

We're researching Hunting now, and ifafter that we don't go for Mysticism, we might actually select Metal Casting as the third tech researched...?