Turn 46

[Harovan]

To be edited by the leaders of the Scholia.

Status:
- Researching Writing at 100%
- 84 gold cash, -1 per turn.

Urgent questions:
Is my (Nathan's) proposed change of orders (see "Change of orders" message) acceptable? It's not optimal if we don't try to go for the Great Library quickly, but it gives us a way to go for it without neglecting our defenses quite as much. Sorry I didn't think of it sooner so there would be more time for discussion, but the worker needs to move this turn.

Military:
- Slash moves into Bolderberg

Economy:
- Hurricane builds barracks. Next build, Warrior. (See my "Change of orders" message.)
- Cyclone laborer goes back to wheat.
- Worker #2 finished road to Hurricane, moves 9 onto forest.
- Worker #3 at the wheat starts mining?

Diplomacy:
- none

[DeepO]

Hmmm.. I'll repeat my request here: move Zobnk onto the worker, so that both he and Cyclone are protected. And if we want to have the South barb free, move him farther South.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Probably a good idea. I'd forgotten about barb horsemen; that probably argues in favor of Slash not moving quite as far north too (since otherwise, a barb horseman in the wrong place might outrun him).

[Shiber]

The thing is, we should want barb camps and units to appear in regions that we can protect.

[Shiber]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Probably a good idea. I'd forgotten about barb horsemen; that probably argues in favor of Slash not moving quite as far north too (since otherwise, a barb horseman in the wrong place might outrun him).

I haven't seen barbarian horsemen this early in any of my games (though barbarian appearance patterns may have been changed in PTW). Can anyone share his own experience with barb horses?

[Arrian]

Let's move the warrior out and try to clear as much of the Fog of War as possible, cutting down on barb encampments. We're in serious build-mode right now, and are very, very light on units. Normally, in SP play, I'd be ok with playing fast-n-loose with barbs and shooting for making money off raiding the camps. But not in this game. Let's play it safe.

-Arrian

[nbarclay]

Change of Orders:

I think I just came up with at least a partial compromise between the "Let's go for the Great Library" crowd and the "Let's not neglect our defenses" crowd, and I've gone ahead and changed my worker orders to reflect it. As our settler nears completion, there's going to be some tile contention between EotS and Hurricane that forces Hurricane to vacate one of the furs for a turn. If we have Hurricane build a warrior (reflecting a momentary drop in production using grassland a turn) and then a chop-assisted spearman, we get our first vet spearman and a potential vet swordsman a lot earlier than we would otherwise and increase our unit count to fend off barbarians. And delaying the Great Library for an extra chop gives us an extra tile Hurricane can work to make up some of the lost production. (Irrigating all the plains lets us mine and work the iron mountain, which is the tile mix we'll want eventually anyhow.)

Also note that in connection with the Great Library project, if we go for it, we'll need not just improved tiles around Hurricane but also more improved tiles around EotS. We could add three workers to Hurricane as quickly as there are enough improved tiles to support them (likely sometime around the time Hurricane would grow to size 3) and then wait until Hurricane grows to size 7 on its own to add the remaining workers. Letting Hurricane grow two instead of one on its own makes a lot more sense in light of our delaying worker production to build a settler first, and would let Hurricane grow one larger than originally planned without the need to build an extra worker to add to it.

This approach should still give us an excellent shot at the Great Library while at the same time preserving EotS as a settler pump and not neglecting our defenses quite as much as we would otherwise. How does it sound?

Note: This change of orders commits us to waiting six turns before starting the Great Library. If there are any serious objections to that from Great Library advocates, we need to hold up the turn to settle them, but remember that one of the votes that makes the "go for the Great Library" idea look so popular is mine and I support this delay. Edit: Great Library opponents may also have some objections since if we don't crank up Hurricane's production, the chop isn't really the best use for our worker.

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Arrian, if we go with my latest change of orders, we'll have a couple extra units in six turns after this one. Would that make barb farming practical in your view?

[Arrian]

Yes, it would.

Give us that extra warrior & spearman, and I have no worries about barbs.

I like this plan. I'm excited to be a part of it. Let's do it! [/Bill Murray - Ghostbusters]

Night!

-Arrian

[Shiber]

I'm in support too. This would certainly get a lot of worries off our heads.
Btw, the turn is here. We've got about 3 hours and 50 minutes before the end of our green hours.

[Harovan]

The turn arrived, but I won't play it yet. We have four more green hours left. Let's discuss a bit more about Nathans change of orders. I support it, it sounds reasonable.

[nbarclay]

Sir Ralph, would you feel reasonably safe about adding workers to Hurricane and going for the Great Library with the vet warrior and spearman built first?

[nbarclay]

Sir Ralph, how about if you go ahead and load the turn and see how our military advisor thinks our military compares with others? (I'm at work right now making up hours I lost to negotiations with Vox earlier in the week, believe it or not.)

[DeepO]

Hmmm... an extra 6 turns delay is not my problem, but don't we need the forest? In my test game, I used it from time to time to get a shield more... but that was before we discovered iron, it might have changed now.

I thought all along that we were going to stop at size 6, letting Hurricane grow to size 3 on its own. If you're proposing to let Hurricane grow to size 4 on its own, I have to vote against it, because it will slow down our build to much. And size 3 only comes in 10 turns... it would be best if we get the iron mined by that time.

What timing is concerned, if we let Hurricane grow 2 more on its own, it will take 20 turns. This should be enough to have everything improved, and to have few workers on stand by to add. Maybe this is not so bad after all, it won't have a big impact on when we grow, given our capacity when it comes to creating workers.

On second thought, go ahead! It should silence the worst fears of the GL opponents, with little impact on the building of the GL. With only one catch: this assumes we do add workers to Hurricane, either 5 to get to size 9, or 6 to get to size 10. With the delay, I would favor 6 workers... it should give us 15 uncorrupted shields (if I counted right), and 15 uncorrupted commerce.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by nbarclay
(I'm at work right now making up hours I lost to negotiations with Vox earlier in the week, believe it or not.)

Ouch... At least you find the time to discuss things here, even while you're catching up with work

DeepO