Gavagai hopes to update this time

[Charriu]

Which chariot and where?

[Gavagai]

A bit of history:



This is what happened immediately after the previous update. I was stupid. Of course, Commodore could block with a spear, no need to even sacrifice a worker. I moved back the chariot and when Commodore followed it with his spear I decided to be clever and move another chariot on a tile 2W from his city. It turned out, however, that Commodore had a second spear in the fog which easily cleaned up my unit. Here is how things looked in the aftermath:



Commodore temporarily zoned me away from the hill but I had more units coming in:





Commodore has a warrior, a spear and two workers on the hill and I have a chariot and an axe on the forest tile. A worker finished biolding a road there and I moved him one tile back where he got paired up with another one. This time it was Commodore's turn to fall for a trick. Next turn he added a wounded spear and a settler to the tile and I was able to road the grassland between us and attack his stack with an axe. His healthy spear died but the axe was heavily wounded and could not serve as a defender for chariot which was under him. Next turn Commodore killed the chariot but had to delete the spear because he did not have any defenders left and I had more units coming. His army scattered:




I decided to waste some movement to destroy the road on the hill 1SW from Horses. He has a chariot in his city under the spear and I do not want to give him any openings. If he does not do anything funny, like building a stupid city just to spite me, I am settling this hill next turn.



Bigger picture. I am ready to settle 1 and 2 will be settled next turn thus putting Commodore's city in a choke. Three turns after that I'll settle 3 thus solidifying my hold on the are.



A sad picture for Commodore. What is even worse for him is that food looks about similar.

[Gavagai]

I want everyone to take a moment and appreciate how extremely competitive our pitboss games have become. I remember that when I started to play this game online ten years ago, my rule of thumb was that if I have ten cities by T100, it means I am in a dominant position. In this game I am on track to have ten cities by T90 and by itself it is not nearly enough to feel myself secure. There other players in this game who are doing much better than me in this respect. The skill level of an average online civ player has progressed dramatically during the past ten years, right? Well, in that case, what's your explanation for this?



This picture shows that we have grown a generation of players with excellent mechanics and zero strategic sense. Because if someone told me ten years ago that I am able to build the Oracle on T81, I would say that something very weird is going on this game. Oracle typically falls to the person who is the first to religion. The very fact that you are the first to religion means that you are ahead of everyone in the Oracle race and if you know that, you simply do not have a good reason not to go for it. And if for some strange reason the founder of the first religion does not build it (he got attacked or something), then there is always a founder of the second religion. The rule is simple: if you can build the Oracle - build it. It is one of the best wonders in the game and if you have a religion it generates you an early prophet on top of that.
In our game the first religion was founded by AT and instead of the Oracle he chose to build this city:



RadarLove was around for, like 20 turns and I suspect it was size one for the most of this time. My scout has just passed by and it saw workers improving the Rice - city's only food resource. The implication of this, of course, is that the Rice was unimproved all this time. How having this city was better than oracling monarchy is simply beyond me.
And there is more to it - AT has a scattering of equally shitty cities to the north of this place. I count on him to contain Rome but, honestly, at that point it seems to me he is just fucked. AT and civac are doing literally the same thing in this game but civac is doing it better and has an excellent early UU on top of it. If he has any sense, he would kill AT with Praets around T100-120. But the enemy of my enemy is my future problem and for now I have a very current problem of my own:



I knew that if I settle Antaboga I will have a huge strategic advantage but I did not realize how big an advantage it would be. Commodore's capital is actually right here and his situation is downright terrible. He is obligated to defend his Horse city because horses but any units defending it would be unavailable for defending the capital. Right now we have an uneasy peace because we exhausted immediate opportunities to pressure each other but long-term his position seems completely lost.



My GNP is the price I am paying for overextension. I am settling very far from the capital and, on top of that, I overbuilt military, being scared that Commodore would try to break out in desperation. As a result, I was losing money at zero percent research at one point. Could take a while to sort it out but now I oracled Monarchy which would solve every single one of my problems. The point which allows us to circle back to the start of this text.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Great commentary, itll be interesting to see how you deal with commodore.

[Gavagai]

Great commentary, itll be interesting to see how you deal with commodore.

If it would be "interesting", it would already mean I have done something wrong because Commodore is in a terrible shape here. On the other hand, he is one of the few players who can swindle this position, so everything is possible.

[El Grillo]

Thanks for the update, as one of those players with poor strategic sense (and I don't claim to have good mechanics to offset that).

[Tarkeel]

It's almost as if everyone is channeling their inner Mark Twain: "Buy land, they're not making it any more", and expecting land to have intrinsically increasing value. While it's in general true that more land is better and taking it by settlers instead of armies are cheaper, there are still opportunity costs as you've clearly demonstrated here.

[Gavagai]

As if to illustrate my point, Superdeath just built The Great Lighthouse - surely a priority with six cities at T85 ))

[Gavagai]

Cannot make a proper report right now but the greatest puzzle of this game is why civac's dotmap is such a shit? How can he do everything else so right but this one thing so wrong?
Also: I feel like I am losing control of this game and need to do something to get it back. Stay tuned for some fireworks.

[Old Harry]

I haven't been following civac - what's wrong with his dotmap?