Miguelito gets tricked by magicians, but Bob isn't fooled. Kaiser rules from behind.

[Miguelito]

good thing then that our forested hamlet came out unscathed

[Kaiser]

I tested God King with Winter Palace and it does not give the God King Bonus but just saw now that you already answered that.

[Miguelito]

I tested God King with Winter Palace and it does not give the God King Bonus but just saw now that you already answered that.

thanks anyways .



Auror signals friendship:






Can we trust him? Well I'm testing his goodwill:






Found a bunch of animals, just of the wrong kind. I don't think we even want those, that far from home, although a lion cage in the cap would not be wrong. And that polar bear does seem pretty lost in the desert, maybe we should adopt him as well? If anything it also get a cage back home. The thing is just that they would cost supply on top of the upkeep, while moving to our cities at 1 move per turn...







Found mack (he didn't see us). He's as scary as expected.





















How in Cernunnos' name is he able to maintain that GNP with just as many cities as we have, which are drowning us in costs?

Form of the Titan was rushed last turn, with his fresh engineer assumedly. Conquest civic is an interesting choice, as it makes it hard to grow cities, although he may have more useful buildings to build than us. Religion will also be interesting for us (with a GA only). Nationhood is nice to erase the Apprenticeship malus, but we even have two pagan temples, so this would be +3 in our first two cities.
Poor Dave who has to deal with him. From demos I gather that he's at least keeping up in power, and the graph does show some losses on mack's side.

mackoti still wins. We have fun meanwhile.

Ya, let's remember this and try to win our side of the continent.

For reference, this is all the land between us:


It is notable that our visible NW is still unsettled. My explanation would be that Dave is around there, who would not claim as much land. That would mean that we have a lot of open space, provided that we can weather Auror until we have poisons and a lot of priests (I guess that's about when we get back to military parity), and Dave can hold mackoti at bay meanwhile.

mack has no contact with Cairo or Auror.

I also checked KTB before and after meeting mack. One of Cairo or Auror researched warfare t89. Which is curious because they had to be seeing it coming that mack would take FotT. Most probably it was Cairo, as I'm fairly certain that Auror researched techs t86 t88 already, but what does he do with it? He does not really seem to have the food to sustain conquest (although he has all those FP valleys, so maybe it is that indeed). He would benefit a lot from NE for a Sorcery bulb, but in that case he should take writing first for the library that is required anyways.

mack is up on us: BW (yay for extra KTB), festivals, HBR, masonry, philo (good ), warfare. And all the next column techs that we can't even see. Notably no Hidden Paths, CoL, or sailing. Also no cartography so no OB. I'm turning back the WB because Gereth Minar needs one and has its hands full with the temple and then priests.

Everybody has festivals, and I'm asking myself if I'm not making a serious mistake in delaying it. Otoh we're making 11 bpt at 0% from elder councils and a scientist, which would get reduced by markets. So those would be rather 2 gpt than 3. Would it really be worth it to research the tech and then build them for 40 hammers each? I don't think so, at least while we have to be paranoid about Auror. Later on yes, also for the specialist slots together with cheap carnivals.

[Jabah]

As far as i remember great commanders can't be born from combat.
You can check if GP from tech are still available in the tech tree. I think the line is removed from description when they are no more available (same with religion founding).

[Miguelito]

As far as i remember great commanders can't be born from combat.
You can check if GP from tech are still available in the tech tree. I think the line is removed from description when they are no more available  (same with religion founding).

It appears like you're right. There is a GG counter in F5, but it just fills up over the limit (I reloaded the Beeri Brawn game and it's at somehting like 400/30). So, the only way to get them would be the tech, wonder GPP (any other besides Form of the Titan?) and command outposts built by organized leaders (Auror! Maybe it is him with warfare after all?)

The icon still appears on the tech tree though, but the same is true for the leaf and the Kilmorph symbol, so I guess they justt stay.

mack finished Hidden Paths and will build the hero
Before deciding to fasttrack priesthood I had entertained the idea of bulbing this with a prophet. Would have been late, anyways. Unnecessary though - had I given some thought to bulb lists and how the game would unfold until t50 or so, we would be about to get out the second prophet by now, and would have had the hero for some time already. Quite annoying, but oh well. As Bob said, he is not crucial to our success here. Priests are, and they are coming.




Auror seems to be serious about relaxing tensions for now. Good. I will build priests as many and as fast as possible of course, but Nameless Tower can move to finish its settler instead of more hunters (also as other cities get the first fawns out), and Enoreth in the north can finish a worker before building fawns. I also am not moving forward with a rather hopeless attempt at his eastern lake city, although I will do  some scouting. Need to remain vigilant, but I think if he delays that plays rather in our favour.
Meanwhile Cairo is building up a lot of power. For a while I thought that would be defensive vs  mack, but they don't have contact. So either mackoti, or us. The thing is just that he really doesn't have units besides warriors and adepts. So no need to worry, at least until the adepts remain without pointy wizard hats. We can't really attack him either with Auror breathing down our neck. Also, without the leaves hero do we have a means to fight his invisibility?
Also that spike from mack .



Wondering if god king is still worth it. At current breakeven (20%  ) GK is making 20 gpt (once the priests work cottages as they should). Cartography would save 5 gpt in civic upkeep, 11 in distance maintenance, and another 5 in number of cities. So, about the same, while CS has the advantage of maintaining that bonus even when breakeven hopefully increases at some point. GK of course has the capital hammer bonus, which has been very very helpful for us. But with 1 or 2 cities more the picture will shift more towards CS, which has to be remembered for planning a GA.


A top spot once more. 

[Kaiser]

Good to see that Auror wants to play nice, how much do you recon he can hide his power by delaying upgrades?

Is the next city #9 on the inner sea with Auror or the flood plain valley next to Cairo to cottage the hell out of it?

How are your plans looking for the NW barb city?
Will you be able to send a scout NW to contact Dave?

[Miguelito]

Gotcha!


It will take like 15 turns to bring it through all those barbs and into our borders (I'm sending a new huntress for reinforcements), but it's there! The bear is C2. We could likely catch it, but I'd rather run around it in order to not take damage on the huntress.
Also Dave's borders, which would complete our contacts. He has cartography, but I fear it will take a while before we can establish a trade route, unless we can get one through Cairo. This is farther south than expected. The positive interpretation is that we have easy access to the NW  once we sort out our cost problems. The negative one would be that it's just as open for mackoti, who apparently doesn't know of cost problems.

Cairo btw has started watering the desert. Good for him, although his border city with us just goes from awful to still pretty bad? Once he's got enough of the adepts and we get KotE (not that we didn't have a million other super urgent techs to research, but if it ever comes to a fight against Auror rust will be huge) I would hope that we can buy that water mana.

Good to see that Auror wants to play nice, how much do you recon he can hide his power by delaying upgrades?

Good thing that you ask, because it made me look up the upgrade cost. We pay 33 gold for a warrior->sword upgrade, and he pays just half of that. ugh. I had not realized that swords/axes are actually 10h cheaper than hunters, and had assumed the cost would be the same. So this is pretty bad (as is the fact that his soon to be str 6 axes cost 10h less than our 5/4 huntresses and 20 less than 5/4 fawns. Well the scorpion will hopefully come in time to remedy that somewhat). I still think if he signals friendship in the diplo window, and apparently doesn't go for the kill immediately, that he likely wants to wait until trebuchets at least. Our advantage is that we have 2 more cities (the last 2 not really productive yet, but that also counts for his most recent one). But yes, we've got to remain very vigilant.
Also relevant that with vaults on top of Immortal costs, conquests are quite hard for him to absorb financially, as he needs extra gold in his coffers for each city that he takes. Not that he will not go for it, but he'll need extra perparation.

Is the next city #9 on the inner sea with Auror or the flood plain valley next to Cairo to cottage the hell out of it?

How are your plans looking for the NW barb city?
Will you be able to send a scout NW to contact Dave?

Definitely 9 for the next settler. If anything, we need the extra build queue for ships (well we also need sailing, but yeah ). I also hope that working those 2 dyes will make the economic hit less severe, and Kalocly can help with a WB which is nice.
We are rather short on workers again, at a moment where I also find it hard to justify building one, as cities are either building good military units or temples in order to start on priests right away (we're finishing 2 the turn before the bulb  ). So I don't see how we would support another far flung city. But the barb city Uddrur can in fact fulfil that role of riverside cottage paradise, and I feel less bad about building workers in the far north in Enoreth. The idea is basically to attack with a few fawns, 2 tigers to throw against the archers, and some subdue animal huntress for the elephant. Fawns should take risks in battle, as we want some to get to level 4 to be upgraded to satyrs eventually. But that's not a small stack, and it has to be balanced with the Auror defense. Also need a road from the south first. So rather on the order of 15 turns. It's not like anybody would take it away from us anytime soon.
Contact with Dave is near accomplished, see above



To pick up this quote:

Also, without the leaves hero do we have a means to fight his invisibility?

Let me know if I'm missing something but I'm aware of these:

• magic eyes. We need sorcery for it, which is 2k beakers, but of course very useful on its own. We'd also research it with 2-3 prereqs (necromancy and alteration, possibly elementalism as well). Far in the future
  
• Empyrean priests. Just a 900 beaker tech, because we'll have priesthood and also want trade for cottage growth and extra commerce. We could switch during a GA or between two, when most forests are ancient already and we have lots of priests of leaves. Rathas are also very good units. Added fringe benefit is turning us from evil to neutral, which would enable druids if we ever get close to that (much unlikely, although I can't help but have fevered dreams of turning all those floodplains to grassland).
  
• Perfect sight promotion. That would require a 26 XP huntress/fawn trained especially for the task (C2+C3+Sentry 1 + 2 + PS). Highly unlikely. We've had 26+XP scouts, but barbs are becoming fewer. Our sentry scout has other promos, so would need like 55XP ? Maybe if we send some to train in the NW? I mean, it's an idea at least. I could not find a unit in the pedia that starts with sentry, is there any?
  

[Kaiser]

Whose invisibility is the issue here, Cairo?

[Miguelito]

Yes. Basically, if we ever want to attack him, he can pop his worldspell and wreak havoc behind our lines. Or if he wants to attack us, of course.

We have a long way to go with peaceful expansion , but if we ever want to go to war, we can either try to attack Auror with overwhelming force - doesn't look like that's happening right now, or split Cairo between the two of us (Auror has to expand a bit more to his west first ). This scenario seems more plausible, even if it's a long way to go as well and Cairo will likely have mages by that time. But he's seriously underexpanded.

[Kaiser]

I would expect Auror to expand W if he stays peaceful with us. Now the scouting with the spider pays dividend in providing us the crucial information that he can only go N or W from where he currently is.