[SPOILER-PBEM14] Bismarck of Maya

[Gaspar]

Here's what I sent to Sandover.

Pharaoh Sandover,

First things first, the river running south from Sandoria doesn't connect to my capital, but it is rather long, and most likely my second city will have a route to it, so we can probably get rather early trade routes going.

I concur with your thoughts that the land seems to be to the east. I've prioritized getting the nearest by lands unfogged in the short term, but I'll be getting a scouting unit off that way to see what's out there soonish. All I've really uncovered in the west is pretty bland terrain, probably some fishing village potential, but that's about the extent of that. Haven't seen any new resources, just another clam and jungled rice on the west coast, not very exciting.

Pyramids makes a lot of sense for you, no question. I always think its sort of a waste of hammers unless you're Spiritual, but its awful nice if you are. I will probably end up grabbing Stonehenge and Oracle, basically because my disappearing dedlurker talked me into at the beginning. Having seen what I've seen of the map as is, I'd really rather eschew Stonehenge in favor of more settlers, but I haven't had time to redo the micro plan, so I'll probably stick with it since you're not interested. That was how I was hoping to talk myself out of it. Nonetheless, I'm hoping as you are that one the other Civs is going for it, and I can leverage Industrious by making someone waste a bunch of turns. Going to have to crank the expansion afterwards so I don't end up with the German open from your last PBEM.

I'm also researching Pottery, probably I'll slip in AH afterwards since my second city site will have AH food as well. Hopefully I'll have that city settled around when one of us gets to Writing so we can get those early trade routes.

I also agreed regarding borders/settling/etc. I certainly intend to push East once I get the closest to home cities settled. I'll assume since neither of us have had a scout stumble upon our borders that we do indeed have a decent amount of room in that direction. Should give them plenty of time to develop their cottages a bit before we come pillage them.

Not much else going on in Maya at the moment, other than a reevaluation of naming scheme, and a wish that I had another scouting unit handy. Anything exciting up there?

Prophet Gaspar

I blamed Stonehenge on Bruindane because he's not around, and frankly I'm embarassed about it. No need for Henge if I'm going Oracle, I'd surely found religion along the way and could use that for border pops. I suppose it has denial value, in forcing other civs to waste hammers on things like monuments, but at this point, I'm too far into it to not go for it. I'll give a full state of the empire with my turn tomorrow.

Bruindane, if you ever return, all apologies for the under-the-bus throwing there.

[Roland]

I guess it's as good as we're going to get at the moment. I agreed with your initial assessment (not liking the message), but I didn't have the time to improve it (busy weekend), and it doesn't matter now anyway. I'm not overly concerned. I think relations shall be fine.

I'm sure you'll get your build on track, and we'll continue to grow strong relations with Sandover, so I think we still have a solid start. We'll see.

[Gaspar]

Most exciting thing to occur at the last turn was I feel fine's expansion to 3rd ring borders. This revealed a fur resource in the south, which I can either wait for the capital to hit 4th ring and grab, or settle a little half city on the southern tip that will steal a fair few tiles from the capital and work the furs and fish. Here's that visually:



Red dot is the location of a possible fur/fish half-city, Brown dot a wheat cow half-city. Neither location will be stellar, but certainly can be made a net positive. Non-financial Civs don't want to get in the habit of building a billion fishing villages though, so remains to be seen what the long term verdict will be. Pretty sure we'll settle Red Dot eventually though, 1/1/4 for the furs plus 5/0/2 for the fishies is productive enough, and we can sneak a mine and a cottage or two in there as well. You can also see from that shot that Noobhenge will be done in 3T. Currently I'm 1.5T off my original microplan, I absolutely have to force myself to go ahead and re-sandbox in the near-turn, because the completion of Oracle was pretty well fine-tuned to make most effective use of whip overflow, and that requires an accurate microplan. Pottery is in, we'll focus on getting a pair of cottages down in the near term. Will most likely go Meditation next turn, as it will come in 2T sooner than Polytheism due to overflow. I'd generally rather City 2 become the holy city than the capital, but I would have had to been building a settler these turns rather than Henge. So it goes.

In diplomacy, Sandover returned this reply:

Prophet Gaspar,

I'm glad to hear about the likely river connection. Going to want fishing before too long anyway so sailing won't be much of a detour to get the trade going. I'm getting animal husbandry next because I can't take advantage of writing just yet, and want to see where horses are.

Darrell (my explorer) just came across a small 3-tile lake directly east of Sandoria, dubbed Darrell Lake. The coast (of the continent, not the lake) is actually expanding northward, so it could be that the landmass is growing wider. No signs of human life so far.

I wish you good luck with your wonder grabs. Have you made any attempts to figure out what the remaining players are doing? I have scooter and Lewwyn pegged for pretty standardized openings, but realised yesterday I'm just making a mess out of Serdoa's score increases (I haven't been following demographics). I can't quite figure out what he's up to, so I'm going to have to go back and take a closer look at the data at some point, unless you've seen something I overlooked?

Excitement... No, most certainly not. I guess I'm getting sort of close to the point where I want to start my first settler, but calling that exciting would be a stretch at best. Looking forward to next border pop though, as it will bring in a peak and reveal a nice bunch of tiles to my southeast that I haven't seen before.

Pharaoh Sandover

Subtle reference to horses and his UU there, we'll see what kind of impact that makes on his diplomacy. War Chariot rushing someone who ran the opening I've run is attractive, but its just a short detour to hunting and a resourceless anti-mounted UU, so I still think I'd be a bad target for early Sandorian aggression. I don't quite have the soul to generate a reply to him right now - if you feel so inclined, Ambassador Roland, by all means. Otherwise I'll try and bash something out tonight when my PBEM12 turn comes around.

Lastly, here's the demos. Someone's at 22000 pop there, which is a size 3 and size 1 city, I'm guessing Scooter. Serdoa is even with him in score, and rival worst is 2000 pop, so he probably has 2 size 1 cities, but I don't actually care enough to figure more than that. Good C&D is a symptom rather than a disease. It rarely actually makes an impact early on, but it is an indicator of a player who is exhausting all possibilities, thusly the players who do a lot of it also tend to do well. The knowledge that Scooter and Serdoa have 2 cities at sizes 3 and 1 tells me little other than they are a bit ahead of me. Anyway, without further ado:

[Gaspar]

Another day, another 11 beakers. Pottery's in and our first cottage is being worked on. Stonehenge is due T28, Buddhism is due T31.

Sandover has met scooter, as he indicated in a missive he sent to me where he subtly nudged me to send him a response. So I'm drafting this and sending it off tonight unless it gets edited.

Pharaoh Sandover,

Good to hear all is still well in Sandoria, even with the recent arrival of the Byzantine corner-dwellers. Hopefully your conversations are as entertaining as last time, makes for better post-game reading. Certainly Sailing will be a higher early priority tech as there's a lot of water on this map, I personally am quite interested to know if there are any islands out there. Both of my current games don't have a lot by the way of opportunities that way, so I'm looking forward to messing around with a navy in this game.

My explorations haven't been especially exciting, as I've mostly been making my way back across the continent in hopes of discovering where precisely my eastern connection exists. Certainly any hopes of anything exciting out west will have to wait for boats. I did get the pleasure of discovering that I am definitely at the southern tip of our sub-continent, and there's a furs resource there, which will help with the happiness. Unfortunately its placed in such a way that I'll have to settle a crummy half-city fishing village to work the tile, but I'm not going to complain too much.

I haven't spent a ton of time on C&D, though my guess for Serdoa was that recently whipped a settler and has 2 size-1 cities. I could be wrong, but certainly a peculiar opening. Scooter also has 2 cities by my guess, pop-3 and pop-1, though I suppose you can verify that by the trade window now. I suspected Serdoa for a possible Henge run, but I guess I was wrong there. Honestly a lot of the reason I went for it in the first place was denial, as you stated, most of the other leaders here have a strong reason to go for it. It'll be a little disappointing if I land it and nobody else has wasted hammers in it.

That's about that from down south, just improving tiles and trying to figure out how to fastest get a few settlers out and find time to get some units exploring. Anything else interesting up the Nile? Do you have a good read on scooter's position relative to ours? To be honest, I wouldn't mind not meeting anyone else for another dozen turns or so, I don't want to lie about anything, but I'd quite like it if some of the dirty Financial civs wasted some hammers unsuccessfully wonder chasing. No need for them to know my plans if we haven't met, yet.

Prophet Gaspar

I suppose I should clarify a bit what I'm going for here. Clearly I want to goad Sandover a bit into an us vs the world, and particularly playing on his old bad blood with scooter. While I don't think he actually harbors real bad blood towards him, I do think if given the opportunity, he'd like to actually attack scooter this game. I'm also encouraging him to think I have a land outlet east, even though I don't know if that's actually true yet, as well as plant the seed that I'm willing to sail away to expand. Basically, I'd legitimately like to befriend Egypt in this game, but I know how Sandover works, and you really can't stop placating him if you have any hope for peace. And believe me, I NEED another 75T of peace, really. The nice thing about being blocked in a bit, is that if I can ally Sandover, he can basically screen me much as Timmy and Moogle screened scooter in PBEM3. While Sandover's too savvy to let that continue all game long, I really only need it to last until I've run enough of a builder's gambit (can't call it farmer's when you're building two wonders before T40) to get myself sustainable. From then on, I'll run a more traditional MP game, and it will be up to Sandover whether my first stacks head north or east. But so long as I do have a eastern outlet, I'd be happy to let Maya and Egypt be the last two standing. Regardless, my gut feeling is there will be a lot of war in this game, so being friends with your nearest neighbor is a huge plus if that's the case.

That will go to Sandover somewhere around midnight my time, if the Ambassador has no corrections.

[Roland]

Pharaoh Sandover,

Good to hear all is still well in Sandoria, even with the recent arrival of the Byzantine corner-dwellers. Hopefully your conversations are as entertaining as last time. It makes for better post-game reading. Certainly Sailing will be a higher early priority tech as there's a lot of water on this map. I am quite interested to know if there are any islands out there. Both of my current games don't have a lot by the way of opportunities that way, so I'm looking forward to messing around with a navy in this game.

My explorations haven't been especially exciting, as I've mostly been making my way back across the continent in hopes of discovering where precisely my eastern connection exists. Any hopes of anything exciting out west will have to wait for boats. I did get the pleasure of discovering that I am definitely at the southern tip of our sub-continent, and there's a furs resource there which will help with the happiness. Unfortunately its placed in such a way that I'll have to settle a crummy half-city fishing village to work the tile, but I'm not going to complain too much.

I haven't spent a ton of time on C&D, though my guess for Serdoa was that he recently whipped a settler and has 2 size-1 cities. I could be wrong, but it certainly is a peculiar opening if I'm right. Scooter also has 2 cities by my guess, pop-3 and pop-1, though I suppose you can verify that by the trade window now. I suspected Serdoa for a possible Henge run, but I guess I was wrong there. Honestly, a lot of the reason I went for it in the first place was denial - as you stated, most of the other leaders here have a strong reason to go for it. It'll be a little disappointing if I land it and nobody else has wasted hammers in it.

That's about it on my end. I'm just improving tiles, trying to figure out the fastest way to get a few settlers out, and find the time to get some units out exploring. Anything else interesting up the Nile? Do you have a good read on scooter's position relative to ours? To be honest, I wouldn't mind not meeting anyone else for another dozen turns or so. I don't want to lie about anything, but I'd quite like it if some of the dirty Financial civs wasted some hammers unsuccessfully chasing wonders. No need for them to know my plans if we haven't met, yet.

Prophet Gaspar

As good as I'm going to get it without pulling something creative out of my head - which isn't happening. Mostly just minor corrections - the usual grammar, syntax, sentence structure, etc. I doubt we have much to worry about with regards to him declaring war on us at the moment, but you never know what someone is going to do. Still, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. So long as we can continue to make / keep the relationship mutually beneficial we'll be fine.

Keep up the good work!

[Gaspar]

Thanks for the editing, Roland. I sent the message along pretty well as is.

[Gaspar]

No turn yet today, but we did receive a response from Sandover. It indicates the general positioning of all teams, so that's useful. I'm thinking that somewhere soon we're going to have to discuss borders and just how well we think we can cooperate. It also appears that scooter is heading down towards my territory. Think I'll send a quickish email to Sandover to find out how long I have until I see a Byzantine unit, as I'm running a quite thin defense at the moment. There's certainly opportunity if Serdoa, Scooter and Lewwyn are all relatively close together. Sandover and I can focus expansion east and try and indirectly put pressure that way. Its important we don't let them get in bed together.

Prophet Gaspar,

I managed to get some information out of the byzantine leader, Mr. Cornerboy, yesterday. I got the impression he's located E N/E of my position, near the northern coast behind a lake. NE of him is Serdoa, and Lewwyn can be found somewhere east of us. I gave away our positioning and some general knowledge in exchange for information, so scooter is sending a warrior in your general direction. He's currently researching a religion (I'm not sure which) but also made it clear wonders aren't on his mind right now. I did not say anything about your wonder plans.

Scooter and Lewwyn are up to two cities for sure. Serdoa apparently has gold at his capital so I'm going to look into his numbers more closely with that in mind. It looks like the three of them are going to be in competition for the same land, which can potentially spark conflict.

Sandoria's border pop revealed ivory at the end of last turn, to my east. Other than that I don't have anything new to say regarding the domestic situation. Have you begun constructing on Stonehenge?

Long response time can certainly put a dent on coordination so it's good to hear that will improve. We're going to be hard pressed to communicate in order to remain on the same page due to our close proximity. No harm done so far, as there really haven't been much to say.

Pharaoh Sandover

[Gaspar]

T27 - all still quiet. As I've said, my opening has been subpar, but I feel like I'll still be in a decent enough position afterwards so long as Sandover doesn't suddenly feel motivated to expand southwards. My current buildplans are basically to go Stonehenge -> Granary -> Settler -> Oracle. After which time, I'll go crazy with Settlers and Workers making liberal use of the whip, growing back on Granaries and Forges. At some point I need to slip another exploring unit in there. I need to find out from Sandover how long til scooter gets to my borders - I may need to either bring Mortician home or build another unit for MP. I don't trust scooter enough to believe he's not C&D'ing enough to tell I have only 1 unit.

Here's what I'm sending Sandover shortly:

Pharaoh Sandover,

Thanks for the information, I appreciate that we've had a very forthcoming relationship. Interesting re: global positioning, other than me, it sounds like plako had a little fun aligning us like the Civs are actually aligned on earth: You in the desert, the Byzantines E-NE across a sea, the Turks east of us and the Mongols east of scooter. I'd postulate we could be on an Earth script, but if this were Africa, there wouldn't be peninsulas and land-bridges off on the coasts. Something to chew on as we gather more map knowledge though. Perhaps my Nile reference was smarter than I realized.

May I ask how you met scooter? Did his unit hit your borders or did he run into Darrell? I only ask so I have some estimate of how long until I encounter him, it'll make it easier to be more forthcoming in our initial exchange if I'm far enough along my plans that he won't be able to impact them.

While its not my policy to believe in "settling agreements" given what we've learned of the map, it might behoove us both to sort of ignore that jungled area and push our respective expansions eastward. It gives us some buffer, and maybe we can gobble some territory to increase that tension you suggested possible if they're all so close together. If they've all met and we've only had ourselves as contact, they're certainly much closer to each other than they are to us. It would definitely be to our benefit to secure some eastern territory peacefully if it meant that our rivals ended up pressed for living space. Of course, my eastern exploration is virtually nil, so obviously I'll have to wait until I have a better view on what actually lies that direction before I can be sure of what land is available to me. Its not particularly important anyway, my first two settlers at least will be staying relatively close to home.

Nothing else to report down here, Mortician is making his way across previously explored territory to get sight on my eastern connections, so I won't be discovering anything new for a bit. I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

As an aside, I obviously can't do anything with my EPs until I make some other contact, but once I do, I would certainly be in favor of an agreement where we keep graph visibility on each other and otherwise move espionage to the [strike]dirty Capitalist running dogs[/strike] financial Civs.

Prophet Gaspar

[Gaspar]

Another day, another turn, hit enter. Stonehenge will be complete @EOT, we'll move onto a Granary followed by a settler. Might slip another warrior in there, just to be extra safe, but I'll have to sandbox the results to be sure it won't delay the big stuff.

Sandover replied to my message, which I did edit fairly heavily before sending off. (Its not that I don't want to wait for you, Roland, its just that I know cozying up to Sandover at a time when he's meeting other players is pretty important for our short-term survival, and time is of the essence.)

Prophet Gaspar,

That's quite a theory, and it makes perfect sense. I've a hard time seeing the civ's placement relative to each other as just a coincidence.

Darrell met scooter's warrior Ron Burgundy some distance east of Sandoria. I'd estimate he'll run into you in little less than 10 turns from now, provided there's no obstacles blocking the way.

I'm not a big fan of settling agreements either. I think we'll do best to revisit the issue of the jungle once we've had more time to explore, and are closer to actually being able to use that land. I have horses east of Sandoria, so I'm sending my settler in that direction once it's done. Beyond that I've concluded to skip the early academy and make a beeline for metal casting. Pyramids here I come!

What are you up to at most? Building Stonehenge while teching towards the Oracle?

EP agreement sounds good. Lets revisit that once you've contact with scooter.

Pharaoh Sandover

I'll figure out what I'd like to say back to Sandover tonight.

[Gaspar]

I'm not particularly in the mood to work on a Sandover reply at the moment, but since the turn won't reach me anytime soon due to my inadvertent hold, I can wait til tomorrow without any repercussions.

Let's talk a little bit about what we know about the game now that we know a bit more about the positioning of the players. Given that we appear to be working off some modified map of the Eastern Hemisphere, we're laid out something like this:



Obviously that's not to scale, nor do I know the exact positioning of anyone other than ourselves and Sandover, nor do I know where SE Asia and Australia precisely fit into the equation. None of that is precisely the point. The precise point is that we have a choice to make in the short term.

What choice, might I ask? Well, on one hand, we can continue as we have been, trying to motivate Sandover's baser instincts into a jihad against the financial civilizations, whilst enjoying a Sandover-sized yellow shield against real foreign aggression. Upside: Only one neighbor to appease, plenty of room to be aggressive later on with little repercussions, lots of time to expand into whatever land we can actually find. Downside: Appeasing Sandover is real, actual work, he's a demanding SOB. At any point he could realize he's providing me defensive cover and turn his stacks around and eat us up.

The other hand? We could align ourselves with the other teams, surely to eventually be ringlead by scooter. [A word on that - Lewwyn is so unbelievably prone to the power of suggestion: look at both WW2 and PBEM6, where he's being led around by the collar by Seven - I virtually guarantee he's fully in bed with scooter by the time we meet him.] Serdoa is the very definition of unreliable ally - he's backstabbed his friends in virtually every game he's been in. PBEM10 and FFHPBEM2 are particularly shining examples of this. Upside: We have the best claim on Sandover's lands, organizing a dogpile against Sandover given his particular brand of diplomacy seems especially easy, the financial teams are bound to butt heads eventually anyway, given that both Lewwyn and Serdoa are hotheads and Serdoa's a traitor, so we can still tech away in peace after Egyptian hostilities have ceased. Downside: Sandover's no easy nut to crack. Failure in a crusade against the Egyptians means a game-long enemy. We have the most to lose with an angry Sandover given our position. That coalition will eventually fall apart and we'll be left with unreliable allies and a certain future war.

So what to do? Obviously in the interim, playing both sides holds a certain appeal. However, I don't especially trust scooter not to completely divulge any conversation I have with him to Sandover, so I have to be careful how much I straddle the fence, as Sandover's the only one who can end our game early. Ultimately I actually find Sandover to be the most trustworthy ally - he's not trustworthy at all, but is 100% upfront and honest about it. He'll always let you know where he stands. Scooter and Serdoa have both lied and backstabbed in other games. Lewwyn is a loyal ally if you can get him to ally, but he's erratic as all get out.

Having laid all that out - how would you handle the initial scooter entreaties, Roland? We have the advantage of knowing we have 7 or 8 turns to make that decision, so let's use it and plan out what we want to say to him and how we want to say it. Getting as much useful information as possible out of scooter seems to be priority one, managing to straddle the fence as much as possible seems to be priority two.