I played a second turn and again my screenshots didn't work! How annoying! Nothing much happened, though - I scooched my two warriors along, and found nothing of interest.
so, couple of things in lieu of a pretty illustrated day from me.
I. The map
Okay, obviously something screwy is happening with the map. Points of observation:
1)The isolated city-state islands are extremely unnatural.
Our northern neighbor is Archduke. He lies roughly NE of us. NW of us we have the sea, which looks like it extends south, so we can assume W and SW is sea as well. Thus, we likely have a SE neighbor, roughly mirrored to Archduke. Maybe slightly further south, about as far south from Antioch as he is north of Kumasi. My next scouting warrior (out turn 31) is headed that way to find him. I see two possibilities for total civilization placement, based on me and Archduke, and assuming Kaiser went for symmetry:
1)A pentagon. In this, I am the NW corner of hte pentagon. Archduke is the apex. Archduke's neighbor is the NE corner, and then two civs are south of the desert in the SW and SE corners. In this, I'd have a neighbor south and just a hair east of me. Each civ has a pet city-state just outside the pentagon, off the coast. In the middle is a small cluster of contestable city-states.
2)A ring. Civs are equidistant from each other around the ring, but ti's more squished north and south than the pentagon. I'd expect my neighbor to be more southeast than south by east in this scenario. Again, Kaiser fills the middle with an inland sea, or, it seems, a desert.
II. Strategic Outline
Either way, if Kaiser's playing around with the map, my best bet to meet btoh more city-states and my neighbors is by plowing right through the middle.
See, we did something like this before, during Kaiser's absence from Realms Beyond. In PBEM 11, we had a dual continent setup - but the twist was, all the city-states were in the middle of each continent: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=9276. My thinking, along with Emperor's, was it would prove an interesting bone of contention there. The meta of "eat all the city-states right away" wasn't quite established yet. That game saw a really great Cornflakes Brazil get wiped away when Archduke's Russia conquered Banzailizard's Germany; however, Rho21's Rome overran his city-states, pindicator's Aztecs, and Rowain's Spartans to dominate his continent first. Rho won control of hte seas and thereby the game.
If that's what's going on here, too, then I'm going to follow Rho's gameplan: Eat the cetner mass of city-states and supercharge myself. Use cheap corps to defend cities and hold off Archduke and my other neighbors, send hte bulk of my army at my last neighbor and eat him, using my superior production base.
Production-wise, then, I'm thinking about skipping campuses and going heavy early military, to take advantage of the vulnerable city-states in the middle. The earlier I go, the more likely I catch everyone else with their pants down. I'll also need a way to hold the city-states with a limited force until I can get all of Zulu online around turn 70.
So, we're going all military techs early here. I'm going to research archery up to the boost, then swap to masonry of all things, leaving Pottery and Irrigation! That lets me build early walls and rams before anyone else - I can throw up walls at Kumasi to hold off Archduke while racing to Mercenaries. By the time he gets rams, I'll have Corps to slow down his immortals, and corps+a ram of my own to go hard at Rome/Nubia/Russia to my south. We'll pick up Irrigation when we can, because I'll want the amenities, but I want the option of rams quick - I think I can steal a march on my foes here and catch them off guard. I've no need of early granaries with so much food and water on the map, nor do I need my plantations up now that I am going with camps instead. :o We'll see how this goes.
III. Micro???
To try to get my feet wet into detailed micromanagement, I started tentatively filling in williams' micro sheets on my big scoretracker spreadsheet. Here's my attempts at Chard, while everything is simple:
I don't know every category that williams uses, although I'm trying to reverse it from the PBEM18 sheet (Kaiser/sub/Woden/Ichabod, sorry, can't show you. Canadian state secrets. :o). I would ask him, but unfortunately the traitorous cur is dedlurking ljub or thrawn or something. So that's out. But I think I worked out most of it. I track food until growth, and I know what tiles the city will be working. Then I add in improvements, which I know will be worked, and account for htem. Finally there's production cards and amenities, which I don't have tracked yet, because I don't quite grasp all the nuances of amenities beyond the basics - I know you get 4 copies per unique resource, spread amongst your cities, I know happy+ecstatic cities (+1, +2?) get bonuses to research, growth, and production, though I don't know how much, and I know unhappy cities take penalties, although again, I don't know how much, nor do I know what the population thresholds are for each required amenity. I'll work that out.
Anyway, my tentative planning with Chard and Bromhead suggests I can have 3 warriors and 2 slingers out by turn 31, 8 turns from now, which seems good, with HBR, the Wheel, and Masonry all inspired. I need a second builder to nab Irrigation with a farm, then go for the camp and plantation. That might be builder #2, meaning pottery needs to come after Masonry or even before to get the timings worked out. But up through 31 was a lot of work for one afternoon, so I'll figure that out later!
There, how's that for a report with 0 screenshots?
so, couple of things in lieu of a pretty illustrated day from me.
I. The map
Okay, obviously something screwy is happening with the map. Points of observation:
1)The isolated city-state islands are extremely unnatural.
- Line of cliffs - makes access difficult and delays conquest.
- Tiny size - just one city+ring.
- Regular shape - no weird peninsulae or bays.
- Dry start for city states. City-states always start on some form of water in natural map generation.
- Grassland bananas (4/0 tiles) are unheard of
- Grassland jungle in general I've never seen before.
- Observe the lake country NE of Chard. Many deer, other high yield tiles.
- The amount of jungles, forests, hills, nad rivers compared to flat plains is unusual.
- No random patches of desert anywhere else, then a huge desert near Kumasi and Antioch.
- Two city states neighboring each other, in stark contrast to isolated Armagh.
Our northern neighbor is Archduke. He lies roughly NE of us. NW of us we have the sea, which looks like it extends south, so we can assume W and SW is sea as well. Thus, we likely have a SE neighbor, roughly mirrored to Archduke. Maybe slightly further south, about as far south from Antioch as he is north of Kumasi. My next scouting warrior (out turn 31) is headed that way to find him. I see two possibilities for total civilization placement, based on me and Archduke, and assuming Kaiser went for symmetry:
1)A pentagon. In this, I am the NW corner of hte pentagon. Archduke is the apex. Archduke's neighbor is the NE corner, and then two civs are south of the desert in the SW and SE corners. In this, I'd have a neighbor south and just a hair east of me. Each civ has a pet city-state just outside the pentagon, off the coast. In the middle is a small cluster of contestable city-states.
2)A ring. Civs are equidistant from each other around the ring, but ti's more squished north and south than the pentagon. I'd expect my neighbor to be more southeast than south by east in this scenario. Again, Kaiser fills the middle with an inland sea, or, it seems, a desert.
II. Strategic Outline
Either way, if Kaiser's playing around with the map, my best bet to meet btoh more city-states and my neighbors is by plowing right through the middle.
See, we did something like this before, during Kaiser's absence from Realms Beyond. In PBEM 11, we had a dual continent setup - but the twist was, all the city-states were in the middle of each continent: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=9276. My thinking, along with Emperor's, was it would prove an interesting bone of contention there. The meta of "eat all the city-states right away" wasn't quite established yet. That game saw a really great Cornflakes Brazil get wiped away when Archduke's Russia conquered Banzailizard's Germany; however, Rho21's Rome overran his city-states, pindicator's Aztecs, and Rowain's Spartans to dominate his continent first. Rho won control of hte seas and thereby the game.
If that's what's going on here, too, then I'm going to follow Rho's gameplan: Eat the cetner mass of city-states and supercharge myself. Use cheap corps to defend cities and hold off Archduke and my other neighbors, send hte bulk of my army at my last neighbor and eat him, using my superior production base.
Production-wise, then, I'm thinking about skipping campuses and going heavy early military, to take advantage of the vulnerable city-states in the middle. The earlier I go, the more likely I catch everyone else with their pants down. I'll also need a way to hold the city-states with a limited force until I can get all of Zulu online around turn 70.
So, we're going all military techs early here. I'm going to research archery up to the boost, then swap to masonry of all things, leaving Pottery and Irrigation! That lets me build early walls and rams before anyone else - I can throw up walls at Kumasi to hold off Archduke while racing to Mercenaries. By the time he gets rams, I'll have Corps to slow down his immortals, and corps+a ram of my own to go hard at Rome/Nubia/Russia to my south. We'll pick up Irrigation when we can, because I'll want the amenities, but I want the option of rams quick - I think I can steal a march on my foes here and catch them off guard. I've no need of early granaries with so much food and water on the map, nor do I need my plantations up now that I am going with camps instead. :o We'll see how this goes.
III. Micro???
To try to get my feet wet into detailed micromanagement, I started tentatively filling in williams' micro sheets on my big scoretracker spreadsheet. Here's my attempts at Chard, while everything is simple:
I don't know every category that williams uses, although I'm trying to reverse it from the PBEM18 sheet (Kaiser/sub/Woden/Ichabod, sorry, can't show you. Canadian state secrets. :o). I would ask him, but unfortunately the traitorous cur is dedlurking ljub or thrawn or something. So that's out. But I think I worked out most of it. I track food until growth, and I know what tiles the city will be working. Then I add in improvements, which I know will be worked, and account for htem. Finally there's production cards and amenities, which I don't have tracked yet, because I don't quite grasp all the nuances of amenities beyond the basics - I know you get 4 copies per unique resource, spread amongst your cities, I know happy+ecstatic cities (+1, +2?) get bonuses to research, growth, and production, though I don't know how much, and I know unhappy cities take penalties, although again, I don't know how much, nor do I know what the population thresholds are for each required amenity. I'll work that out.
Anyway, my tentative planning with Chard and Bromhead suggests I can have 3 warriors and 2 slingers out by turn 31, 8 turns from now, which seems good, with HBR, the Wheel, and Masonry all inspired. I need a second builder to nab Irrigation with a farm, then go for the camp and plantation. That might be builder #2, meaning pottery needs to come after Masonry or even before to get the timings worked out. But up through 31 was a lot of work for one afternoon, so I'll figure that out later!
There, how's that for a report with 0 screenshots?
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
![[Image: NaiveSimilarHairstreak-size_restricted.gif]](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/NaiveSimilarHairstreak-size_restricted.gif)
)))
