Supercharrihitstouristicharryshallowdocious

[Old Harry]

Turn 87

We've kept the great engineer on ice for a couple more turns. Deciding that trebuchet's aren't the most useful on defence we've hurried to Archery then Iron Working to allow us to build crossbows if we need them. TBS is definitely about to hit someone. His choice is the top power who ruined his game or the bottom power (us) who haven't bothered to tech anything pointy...


Archers are going to be better than axes if the unit composition we expect is on its way, but perhaps the whipping spree and power bump will be enough to put him off us?


Now we just need iron for xbows. I rolled the turn and...

It's not hookable next turn. The earliest we can start building xbows is t89.


The good news is that t89 is when he's due to attack us or Pindi, so we'll know if we need to burn the GE on machinery or if we can build the MoM and get back to farming in peace.

[Old Harry]

Turn 90

A few more turns of biting nails. This was promising - Pindi's stack returning to the front with TBS a couple of turns ago.


This was us finally building some units.


Then this turn - according to PBspy - TBS took an Aztec city without it shrinking a size. I was worried this was a peace treaty, but I think it was just that Pindi had emptied the city so it didn't shrink. It wouldn't have been something to do with recapturing would it? Also TBS adopts his end-of-golden age civics and pops another GP while CF starts his first GA.


I send Pindi a horse-horse deal intended to show that we'll attack TBS some time soon (t92) but who knows how he'll interpret it. (Just as long as he doesn't accept it like he did with the rice-clam deal we sent indicating a split of the unsettled cities on our borders. Presumably he just thought we really wanted clam?)

With Currency and sacrificial altars everywhere his gold income is higher than ours (72 vs 62) but I hope our rep specialists and great people can push us ahead on tech.


Demos and Power. Cornflakes got Alphabet so I offered him open borders. Hopefully he won't try to charge us for the privilege (difficult as neither of us has Currency).

Oh, and after the turn roll we completed Parthenon and Mausoleum of Mausolus - with a hot Aztec-Babylonian war and construction in at the end of turn we felt fine burning the great engineer on the wonder rather than Machinery. Next I really want Music for the free artist to start a golden age (it'll be more than 4 turns btw), but we should probably get HBR to build some Wellies (it will only take 2 turns)...

[Old Harry]

Turn 95

TBS declared and burnt one of our crumple-zone cities (if I'd been paying better attention it'd have had more than one spear in) with a 4-move galley. Nicely played. He's also got a 2-move axe wandering around, so we should watch out for that.


I have a question for the lurkers. Somehow he's putting 8 espionage points per turn into us, but no-one has got to Code of Laws yet, so he can't build courthouses. How can he do that? He's Babylon running Hereditary Rule/Vassalage/Serfdom/-/Organised Religion and he hasn't had a great spy to settle. Do Merchants or Scientists give EPs when you settle them?

Demos and power. We landed MoM and started our first golden age. Things don't look great though as CF is also in a golden age and TBS took back his cities from Pindicator. Oh. The EPs are because Pindi built him some Sacrificial Altars which turned into courthouses when he liberated the cities. Damnit.

I have to say we're struggling to play this game properly - the turn arriving after 10pm (midnight for Hitru) most nights is more of a killer than I'd anticipated. I'm in favour of all the mechanical aspects of sequential turns, but the locked-in turn order is just horrible.

[Charriu]

Does he have a castle in his capital providing +25% espionage there or something similar. Did he conquer cities with courthouses?

[NobleHelium]

1. Pindicator [5pm - 9pm Pacific / 0100 - 0500 UTC] although I can most likely fit it in throughout the work day
2. Cornflakes [6-9 am Eastern US / 1100 - 1400 UTC]
3. Gavagai  05:00 - 21:00 GMT
4. The Black Sword 1700-2300 GMT (I'm pretty flexible about playing before that these days)
5. Old Harry [1900-2300 UTC]

I would scrutinize this player order some more.  In particular Gavagai's window is enormous and most likely he prefers a smaller portion of the bigger window.  So I would have further discussion along these lines and see if this is really the best spot for him.

I warned you guys to pay more attention to the turn order.

In any event, I suppose congratulations are in order for the restoration of your club.

[Old Harry]

I warned you guys to pay more attention to the turn order.

In any event, I suppose congratulations are in order for the restoration of your club.

I now recall I found playing after TBS in PB18 pretty tough too, so it's not solely down to Gav's tardiness.

And thanks, it's nice that Spurs are back to their old selves.

Turn 98

In the game:  Cornflakes beat us to Code of Laws and Confucianism by one turn.  This turn TBS offered peace, either to eat Cornflakes or Gav with knights or to stagger his peace treaties with us and Pindi. We took peace as we want to build markets not war elephants right now.

In other news we have an ambitious plan to Liberalise Mil Trad while fitting in 3 golden ages before Nationalism. We'll have a 50/50 engineer at the end of this golden age which could be saved for Taj... We're actually going for Civil Service before Music as we don't think there's competition for the great artist, but on recent form that's risky.


Demos look pretty bad given we're the only ones in a golden age. Hopefully growing a few pop and building some cheap markets will fix that.

[Zed-F]

Do you expect to be able to replace Gup X?

[Tarkeel]

That's a pretty hefty research goal, how many bulbs do you plan to fit in there?

[Old Harry]

Do you expect to be able to replace Gup X?

The settler is ready next turn and we're going to move the city to grab both seafood. It won't be on a hill, but hopefully we'll remember to keep enough units in it this time.

That's a pretty hefty research goal, how many bulbs do you plan to fit in there?

This I'm not totally sure of. We could bulb Philosophy and double-bulb Education. But we also want to run MoM-extended golden ages and the next great person already costs 600 GPP. In a golden age we make quadruple GP points, so that's still not a huge hurdle (especially as the Representation beakers still make specialists better than cottages) but after 1000 GPP the increments are 200 points and things start getting really expensive.

At the moment we have one great scientist and six cities with GP points. Here's a very confusing, mixed up way of comparing all those cities:
A - 66% sci in 9 turns without working specialists
B - 250 GPP in 88% sci, but it doesn't have the food to work specialists if A is growing (we're growing A to take advantage of a bureacap in 5ish turns)
D - 50/50 engy/artist in 9 turns
F - Sci in 12 turns
H - Merc in 8 turns
I - 350 GPP in 70% sci

I think we want to hurry D by a turn to pop the 600 point GP by the end of the golden age, get H to pop the 700 point merchant the turn after and grab the Music artist around the same time. That leaves us with a scientist, a merchant, an artist and an artist/engineer. If D gives an engy we save him for the Taj Mahal and start the golden age with sci/merch while an artist gets used to start the next golden age straight away with the merchant.

During the next golden age A, F and I are due to pop great people and B might be able to as well (800, 900, 1000 and 1200). Hopefully three of these will be scientists and one merchant, allowing us to start the next golden age with scientist/merchant/artist the turn before we get Nationalism. That leaves us with 2-3 scientists to use on bulbs at various stages of the process.

TBS is likely on his way to Guilds in the next few turns and we could have tried to draft him and get our own knight force out to face him down, but rushing to knights is something I've done in every (successful) game I've played here, and bypassing knights for Cuirs is an interesting idea. The fact that it's an extra 5000 beakers (disclaimer - I haven't checked - it could be a lot more) and that rushing to Liberalism usually doesn't win you the game (because everyone else tools up while you're concentrating on economy) weigh against this plan, but if we just get enough catapults and war elephants together we'll be fine, right?

Oh, okay, we plan to draft some Oromo Warriors too.

[Tarkeel]

At the very least it sounds like it will be interesting, and quite the golden chain. Slight PB58 spoiler:

While we technically didn't tech cuirs before knights in PB58, it was pretty close, taking Gunpowder from Guilds instead of Education. With PHI you have more incentive to take the normal Education route though.