Luddite/Pindicator

[pindicator]

Sorry I missed your post yesterday.

Anyway, first of all, we're teching much faster than I thought we would. We can actually finish iron working next turn! So we'll have to adjust our micro plans accordingly. Maybe the worker that's camping the ivory should move up onto the pigs, instead?

That's awesome news! Changing the worker to the pigs is the right move. We already have a source of ivory from HappyAnniv+Bye, so the faster we can get the pigs going and Stay Hungry growing, the better.

I put Long Goodbye on a settler. I'd like to settle it on top of that stone. HappyAnniv already has plenty of food, with crabs, sugar, and eventually bananas, so we can give the pigs to the new city there. And it'll basically secure that eastern island for us.

Hmmm... stone huh. Any thoughts on stone wonders? I could see us going for Pyramids or Hanging Gardens. Pyramids would be ... a long shot. I think it would tie up too many hammers even with stone hooked up. But Hanging Gardens could be just what we need since we're doing a city spam. Will have to see how we can fit it in with micro, but I can already tell you we'll need more workers if we want to do the standard whip aquaduct/chop HG.

Here's the situation in the north right now. I'm still tempted to try and settle on the grass hill up there, by the northern island. The capital can build units to defend it, while Hercules builds the settler. Or vice versa. Right now Mackoti's power is very low, but he might settle there soon. What do you think?

You know, I kinda want to grab that incense. I don't see any other sources around and it would make a huge score... but I worry about defending such a city. So here's a counter-proposal: settling 1E of the incense. It can grab the pig and may also pick up the corn in 2nd ring up north. It'd be ballsy and I'm sure mackoti will not like it, so we will need to defend it. I only worry it may be biting off more than we can chew, but it will be entertaining for the lurkers at least.

In the south, we could be really evil if we felt like it. Fierce's capital is directly southwest of us. We could move chariots down there, and hit it before he has a chance to move in defenders.

...Probably not a good idea though.

Yeah, as tempting as that is, with Fierce every turn that passes we will get stronger compared to him. If we wanted to go this route, I don't know if we could land-grab and defend a city by mackoti. I think it's one or the other.

[luddite]

That's awesome news! Changing the worker to the pigs is the right move. We already have a source of ivory from HappyAnniv+Bye, so the faster we can get the pigs going and Stay Hungry growing, the better.

Yeah. Only problem is it'll take two turns to move up there, since we don't have construction yet for bridges. It might actually be faster to build a road on the pigs first, so we can save a turn on getting a second worker there.

Hmmm... stone huh. Any thoughts on stone wonders? I could see us going for Pyramids or Hanging Gardens. Pyramids would be ... a long shot. I think it would tie up too many hammers even with stone hooked up. But Hanging Gardens could be just what we need since we're doing a city spam. Will have to see how we can fit it in with micro, but I can already tell you we'll need more workers if we want to do the standard whip aquaduct/chop HG.

Well, we don't have to actually finish the wonders. We can just collect the fail gold- getting two gold for one hammer is great. And if Mackoti wants to build the pyramids like he usually does, then we won't have to wait long to get that. Stone henge is still available too- that'll probably go very quickly. I doubt we'll be able to get the HG, just because our tech will be a little slow, and we beelined ironworking. But if it's still available, sure.

There is one other use for stone I can think of...

You know, I kinda want to grab that incense. I don't see any other sources around and it would make a huge score... but I worry about defending such a city. So here's a counter-proposal: settling 1E of the incense. It can grab the pig and may also pick up the corn in 2nd ring up north. It'd be ballsy and I'm sure mackoti will not like it, so we will need to defend it. I only worry it may be biting off more than we can chew, but it will be entertaining for the lurkers at least.

Getting the incense would be fun, and all that land too. I'm slightly regretting that we didn't settle Stay Hungry 1SE of the incense, now. Suppose we settle 1E while also settling the stone, (and researching masonry) and then immediately chop a city walls? It's flatland, unfortunately, but the 50% bonus would make up for that. At least until catapults come out... if we settle there, we'd need to get our own catapults ready to defend, quickly.

I dunno. It's taking a big risk. I'll have to think about that some more.

Yeah, as tempting as that is, with Fierce every turn that passes we will get stronger compared to him. If we wanted to go this route, I don't know if we could land-grab and defend a city by mackoti. I think it's one or the other.

Yeah, I wasn't seriously proposing that. As long as we don't get dragged into an early war with Fierce, we'll be fine down there.

[luddite]

We finished iron working. And it just so happens that the iron is located next to both jungle cities...


So far this map has been extremely symmetrical. It's a reasonable guess that ALL the iron in the map is located in jungle areas, between players. In that case, not only have we acquired two iron, but we've also left our neighbors without an easy source. A knight rush against people who can't build pikes could be deadly...

[luddite]

Main problem is I don't really have any experience with bee-lining knights. I don't know if there are tricks to it we can use, or if it's as simple as just selecting guilds on the tech tree and autopiloting for a while. Maybe run a forge engineer and bulb machinery? Or get currency, build a market and run 2 merchants to bulb guilds?

[luddite]

Or... how's this for an idea? We're already going for early calender, because we have so many calender resources. How about building the MoM, and then running two golden ages? 18 turns of golden age would get us to guilds really fast, and give a hefty boost to our production as well.

Those islands will really increase our maintenance a lot though... not sure if it's worth settling them.

[luddite]

Man, fierce just keeps building units, and it's really annoying. He now has 4 axes, 1 spear and 1 chariot in border cities visible, whereas we only have 2 axes 1 spear 1 warrior there to defend. I feel like we'll have to divert more hammers to building units, even though we're already 2nd in power.

Oh, and Mackoti built the GLH like I thought he would.

[pindicator]

I see he's expanding his repertoire of wonders. I want to try to nab that island from him, if only to deny the extra continental trade routes.

[pindicator]

So looking at the tech preference for great merchants, bulbing isn't a grand idea. we'd have to go CoL, Civil Service, Paper before we could bulb guilds. Better would be a trade mission (hard to orchestrate in a CTON but doable) or a GA. I like a trade mission to upgrade pre-built HA's to knights, but otherwise I agree on GA being the best way to speed to it.

But do we want to use 2 GAs so early?

[luddite]

Well, we could also just attack Mackoti with knights and try to take the GLH from him . Only problem with that plan is that NS7 might be able to take half his land from the rear. But if we're gonna do that, the islands are pretty marginal... it'll take a long time before they're worth the maintenance hit.

My thinking with the golden ages was that if it allows us to successfully conquer all of someone's land (including, maybe, the GLH), then we'd pretty much have the game in the bag. We could just do it with one golden age though... I'm really not sure how the timing will work. And we can do the math on whether golden age or merchant trade mission is better.

[luddite]

One thing I just realized about this game- we've been able to get by with very, very few workers. usually less than our city count, despite it being on quick speed where you need more. I guess there's three reasons for that. One is the map- very few forests to chop, so we just didn't need as many workers going around, and we got Bronze working late anyway. Another is Surya- we don't need any monuments, and granaries are a 1-pop whip, so the new cities have been getting set up pretty efficiently on their own. Then also it's just been our overall strategy of focusing on outward expansion rather than development- "horizontal rather than vertical" as they say in civ 5. But I think we'll have to start building a lot more workers, soon. Gotta chop down all that jungle...