Turn 126, 50 BC

[DeepO]

I'm not sure about investigating cities, but when you establish an embassy, you see which of the tiles in the capital are blocked, and you see the unit, and the amount of units (the little bars) in the city view. You can't click them to see how many units of what types exactly are there, of course.

DeepO

[Shiber]

Actually it doesn't matter, we can keep the units just outside the town's radius and still manage to load them within one turn and embark. These coastal units don't have any culture in them so the city's radius shouldn't be any longer than just one tile, right?

[DeepO]

No, I think you will see all tiles in city view, not just the cultural ones...

DeepO

[nbarclay]

I established the embassy with RP (46 gold or so) and just sent out the screenshot from it. New Madrid and Barcelona would cost 70 and 72 to investigate, respectively. I'd rather wait until we're ready to launch an attack to do the investigations, though.

[nbarclay]

We could research Banking in 10 turns at essentially break-even (+3 gold at this particular moment). With the FP in Arashi and a library in Hurricane scheduled to complete next turn, that should go down just a little.

[asleepathewheel]

Its nice to see that pamplona is producing vet medieval infantrys, but at 4 turns each, ouch! Not to mention the two (or three turns to get them to the front) Are they keeping the Pike there for happiness purposes? Would a size six on chieftain with a temple and a ton of luxes need one policeman? Send that guy to border patrol




On another note, we could solve the myster of the Great library by building an embassy with GoW, but its a tad expensive, 86 gold, but might be worthwhile to do since we are at peace. Maybe we could share the cost with them.

[nbarclay]

RP may be garrisoning everything instead of focusing all their units at the front. I had our galley with the two pikes check out Murcia on the southeastern coast and there's a regular pike there. (Of course with us having the Great Lighthouse, RP would be taking a certain amount of risk leaving coastal cities ungarrisoned.)

[nbarclay]

Given the high likelihood of our fighting soon, I'm tentatively canceling the draw-down in EotS's size and starting it working on a six-turn knight. If we want to draw down its size after all, we can switch to a three-turn settler.

I'm also shifting Sandstorm over to a settler instead of a worker. It can build the settler as quickly as it could two workers, and only be four food below where it would be producing workers; I figure the advantage of getting a new town settled faster can pay that back. (We need one more settler than we have now to finish settling our homeland, and it sounds like we'll want another one on stand-by for possible use in an invasion force, so even building one in EotS and one in Sandstorm won't give us more than we have a use for.)

[nbarclay]

I have a sighting of red borders outlining the center of the land mass sticking up northwest of the main part of Lego's territory. The city site itself is too far inland to be seen, but that confirms where Vox will be moving to.

[nbarclay]

Turn and shots sent.

[DeepO]

Some interesting things on the Pamplona screenie:

- RP doesn't have a large cash reserve, which is strange seeing as they are running 100% tax. They didn't buy a lot of technology either. However, they are in the ability to upgrade warriors to MIs (even if those would most likely be regs), and don't have knights yet (some horses though). Their force is likely to be large in numbers, not only strength

- that reg pike in Pamplona is just passing: it isn't fortified, and they have need for MPs. Which means that either it was very recently upgraded from a spear, was build last turn in Salamanca, or came from the bonus grass 966 from Pamplona (a good rally point for troops). At any rate, RP is still building troops in more cities, they know what is coming.
BTW, Salamanca is not very likely to be the place the pike came from: it makes 3 shields + 2 food, meaning an expansion in 10 turns (which didn't happen), and a pike in 10 turns. It has to have built a worker last, if the plains used was irrigated for at least 10 turns (which isn't necessarily true, the forest would also have worked)

- there is a granary, barracks and temple there, and currently they make 11 shields (a waste BTW, they could be making 5 surpluss food and 10 shields, meaning a growth of 1 turn faster. You'd expect some micromanaging in a capital run by a team of over 20 people). Again, this means more troops build here, although some growth related units (workers and settlers) will also have been built here. It is possible to make a 4 turn settler pump from the city, even if it doesn't look like they did that.

- the tiles seem to indicate a high commerce focus, but no library is build. I don't think that even if they would survive, they would start doing their own research soon.

- They're importing wines from GoW, although I don't see a source of extra connected lux (could be hidden beneath a city, I don't see that on the screen shot). They wouldn't be paying them gpt, would they?

DeepO