[SPOILERS] Charriu and Zalson are fighting the honorable post count war!

[Charriu]

T48:

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The barb can't decide what to do. Come on, get on with it (in the west)

As you can see I changed War Wilhelms exploration route. That way I can still see the new city area and the coast is clear, great. As soon as the city is founded I will move Wilhelm 1E for further exploration and fogbusting.

[Charriu]

T49:

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Well the barb is obvious drunk. I was curious if the barb would enter my culture at all and found this in my research. The important part is this:

A) NumCities > 2*NumPlayersAlive:

• Barbs will enter your territory if they can pillage an improvement on their next turn, so the common 1 barb Warriors and Archers will intrude to pillage improvements in your border tiles. I'm not certain about 2 mounted barb units (do barb Chariots spawn regularly?). I know about a random event which places barb Horse Archers on the map, but they demonstrate "special" behavior (they directly target the barbs' TargetCity of the area).
  

So looking at the city count:

RFS and me: 2 cities
Everybody else: 3 cities

Great that means we are clearly in A) and the barb should not enter my territory if he moves near my marble. Just to be sure I tested it in the Simulator and it really works like described. Another good news in that is that if he moves towards RFS he will enter his territory to pillage his corn. So go west barb. Of course this only stays true if nobody starts founding their 4th city.

 

Shallow just founded his 4th city. Oh my god, we are really falling behind. Thank god RFS is my neighbor and I can found my 3rd in 2 turns. And Shallow is also Imp, so you would expect him to expand quickly. But this means I have to keep a close watch on the city count in the next turns. If RFS founds his third or any other player his 4th we are no longer in A).

EDIT: Oh and nobody has founded any religion so far.

[Zalson]

He is being advised by OldHarry and presumably Fintourist and the gang—plus he is IMP. I wonder how he has enough worker labor? He is probably whipping out the settlers, off unimproved tiles and only working high food. In contrast, our start hasn’t made as good an emphasis of that, nor do our traits help us much with that.

It’ll be interesting to read after the fact; I think the extra units we needed — plus improving the corn late, didn’t help. I think you’re playing pretty well though.

[Charriu]

T50:

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International: We finally know who our eastern neighbor is: Shallow. Welcome to the party Shallow Unfortunately that's not a good sign for us. As already mentioned he already settled his 4th city. The city you see above is probably not his capital, because I expect him to be equally far away as RFS. The good news is that the land between us only has a plain cow as support, but I can imagine a city on the hill south of the cows. Of course espionage went into Shallow. My biggest concern with Shallow is that according to my meager C&D he may already have Animal Husbandry since T35 and therefore could already have build some immortals. I may have to change my plans and start some spearmen ASAP. What's your opinion?
Back on the other side, the drunken barb went into the fog again. Did he move north? Did he visit RFS?  

Graphs:


I'm falling back in GNP, which was expected after double whipping some turns ago. Interesting to see RFS having bad GNP despite him having 6 or 7 pop during the last turns.



Similar as with GNP a falling graph due to double whip.



I'm concerned about the dip in crop yields. I know I double whipped a few turns and Coeurva has one city more than me, but it's still concerning. At least I will be working all my good food tiles this turn and the following turns, so the graph should go up again.



RFS developed Archery shortly after us, but he's not building any military as far as I can tell, good.

[Charriu]

You know how I suspected that Magic is in trouble. Well I just found out what it was. I've went back in Civstats to see if Magic was at war with Shallow at some time, because of Magic playing the turns late. Look what I found here.



Back then I noted this down as Magic just whipping. What I did not look at is the time stamp of his login times. His score decreased while he was logged out. Because there was not "new turn" message this can't be done by the barbarians, so another player must have razed it and the only players, who were online at that time were:

Coeurva and Superdeath:

Coeurva logged out at that time stamp. I think he would not log out if he just captured and razed a city. Superdeath logged out 5 minutes after the decrease. Therefore I conclude that Superdeath was/is at war with Magic. He also had a score decrease at 10:51. I'm pretty sure that I'm right in my conclusion, but I have some questions to my dear lurkers, which should make it clear what happened:

1. If somebody autorazes a city, how does civstat respond? Does it show an score increase and an immediate decrease? I expect civstat to show nothing here, because the game caused the raze.
   
2. If somebody voluntary razes a city, how does civstat show this? Does it show an score increase and a later decrease? I expect an increase followed by a decrease show in civstats.
   

I have to check if I noted any other score decrease was wrong. Unfortunately this means that Shallow was not at war with Magic.

[Commodore]

If it's an autoraze, no increase. If it's voluntary, you do see the immediate up/down.

[Charriu]

Thanks for the info. This means that his third city was razed, which he founded just 2 turns before.

[Charriu]

I've looked into producing a spearman and prepared 2 plans. My copper is still not connected, so I have to send down a worker, which unfortunately delays the spearman. Not connecting the copper sooner could be a huge mistake in the long run. These are the plans:

1. Spearman in Exdeath on T58: This plan does not delay any settlers. The spearman would arrive in Karlabos in T61.
   
2. Spearman in Exdeath on T56: This plan does delay the 4th city to T60. The spearman would arrive in Karlabos in T59. I would also have to take a gamble with my workers and 4th city in the north, because I need to keep my warrior on happiness patrol in Exdeath.
   
3. Start a spearman in Karlabos on T54 and whip it in T57, producing the spearman in T58
   

I will have to decide on which plan to put in action on T54 for the first two plans. I'm tending towards whipping one spearman in Karlabos
If Shallow comes towards my direction with his warrior in the screenshot above I would also need to send my warrior back to Karlabos for protection. It would be better if I can keep him on top of a hill to see any incoming Immortals.

[Zalson]

Did you move 100% espionage to shallow_thought? We'll find out soon enough how he's moving? Also, a sentry net can help us out against him.

I wouldn't worry too much about the food number just yet: we have 1 fewer cities than our competitors and just whipped both of our cities. We're going to boost it by 8 in what, 2 turns (crabs at Wind Raptor and Karlobos)? Right there with the lead, then. (31 vs 33).

However, I think the thing that this does indicate is that we have over-improved our core. We have 2 mines we're not working currently. I don't think the other players are doing that but we're working on rectifying this problem by regrowing as efficiently as we can.

I don't think we should worry about Immortals until we can see them. If he's going to rush us, we can make him pay. Let's not delay the 4th city more than we have to.

[Charriu]

Yes, I did put 100% espionage to Shallow.

To clarify what I tried to describe about the map. This is what the map could look like in my imagination:

I'm now also pretty sure that the map looks somewhat like this. This means that directly north of the gem is another player (yellow dot) and directly east of him the last player. That means everybody has 4 neighbors, 2 close and 2 far away, and 1 natural ally. I should find out who my last neighbor is. If it's Superdeath it's bad because that means our natural ally Magic is struggling.