Cloak & Dagger

[mostly-harmless]

Exactly!

I don't think PAL will be of great military help in the near to mid future. It is still early days and us coming over as weak (when asking for help) might lead to PAL considering their alliance.

mh

[Krill]

I'll give you guys first refusal on being editors if and when you win Have to say that your's is the forum I enjoy reading the most. Keep up the spam

[sooooo]

Templars have 6 quechuas, right? Acting as both scouts and military. We have 2 scouts and 5 military units. I don't think having 6 quechuas is cause for alarm. Asking PAL for help when they have 6 quechuas would make us seem rather pathetic.

[Sullla]

I'm not terribly worried about Templars either. Based on their recent diplomatic messages and the disposition of their units, I just cannot see them trying to attack us any time soon. 3 of the 4 quechuas are positioned as scouts, and another two are garrisoning their two cities. I think the Templars are actually terrified of us attacking THEM, and are trying desperately to stave that off. At least, that's how I read things.

mh, I'm more concerned at the moment by the fact that the "best" GNP number has leaped all the way up to 54! This could be one of two things: either one of the civs in the fog (Rabbits/Banana) is really doing well, or Imperio just connected their gold resources and started working the tiles. I'm actually hoping for the latter, as it would mean a lesser increase (Imperio was already at 41). We'll know for sure at the end of this turn.

Our prospects are pretty good in the short term. I worry though about the long-term though, given our generally unimpressive terrain and total lack of happiness resources. Imperio's land is just ridiculously better than ours, and they will be able to grow their cities to larger sizes, thus working even more tiles, many of them floodplains... I think we've played things about as well as possible, but there's only so much we can do with the start we received. The obvious answer would be to go on the attack - oh wait, we don't have any strategic resources either! Silly me. Anyway, feeling a little less optimistic about our situation down the road. Still, we'll come up with something.

Krill said our forum is the one he enjoys reading the most. Perhaps we have the best discussions and the best team dynamics, eh? Well maybe not. But still a good sign.

[Sullla]

Some updates from the last few turns:

Last turn (T55), the big news was that the Templars finally got off their fannies and settled a second city. PAL also double-whipped their capital (from size 4 to 2), which almost certainly means another settler is on its way out. (They weren't whipping a military unit, because there was no increase in Solider points.) My guess is that we will see them found city #4 in the next couple turns. Their capital regrew to size 3 on T56.

Imperio researched a tech on this turn (T56), a mere four turns after discovering Meditation! That means the tech was cheap to research, and they also swapped to a gold tile at the capital (GNP up by 12, shields down by 1) for T55 to get it done one turn sooner. Hmm... what would be a tech that is cheap, comes after Meditation, and you would have an impetus to get to first? I bet dollars to donuts that they just grabbed Priesthood and are going for the Oracle right now. Good news that they probably aren't working on a settler, bad news if they land the wonder.

If I had to do a very unscientific ranking of the current situation in the game through the first 55 turns, it would look like this:

1) PAL: Way more cities than everyone else, and rocking the food stat (29! average = 18) for massive whipping. Thankfully not on our continent.
2) Imperio: Outstanding land, founded an uber second city (five resources!), landed Stonehenge and Islam with inside track at Oracle, Financial trait, and Templars seem totally uninterested in containing them.
3) Realms Beyond: Doing the best we can with what we have, and surprisingly competitive given zero horses/copper and *ONE* resource at the capital.
4) Templars: Hopelessly behind in every possible category, except culture in the capital city. No clue what these guys are thinking. They've been sitting at 8 or 9 food/turn for the past 30+ turns! (average = 18, remember)

We don't have enough info to rank Rabbits or Banana. Based on Demographics spying though, Banana seems to be doing much better with their super-seafood capital than Rabbits. (For an Imperialistic civ with +100% settlers, where are all their cities? PAL and Banana are both out-expanding them.) Looks like 2 competitive and 1 "role-playing" team on each continent, by my guess.

[mostly-harmless]

Originally posted by Sullla
Their capital regrew to size 3 on T56.

That is not quite correct. It was either one of their other two cities growing back from size 1 to size 2. My money is on Memphis (3rd city) which seems to have a much better food potential (with being a coastal city) than Thebes (2nd city).

(You can derive this by looking at the increase in population across the rivals. 5000 pop increase is only possible when a size 1 city (1000pop) grows to size 2 (6000pop))

Originally posted by Sullla
Imperio researched a tech on this turn (T56), a mere four turns after discovering Meditation! That means the tech was cheap to research, and they also swapped to a gold tile at the capital (GNP up by 12, shields down by 1) for T55 to get it done one turn sooner. Hmm... what would be a tech that is cheap, comes after Meditation, and you would have an impetus to get to first? I bet dollars to donuts that they just grabbed Priesthood and are going for the Oracle right now.

Probably right. I was first thrown by the unaccounted soldier point increase of 2000. But Imperio has all the 2000 point tech apart from Sailing, which would make no sense for them.

So a military unit built elsewhere is more likely.

With all the civs growing and expanding the branching possibilities become more and more. I am still surprised we can analyse as much as we do .

mh

[Sullla]

mh, I was looking at Civstats, and it seems as though Banana hasn't logged into the game for the last week, or played any of the past three turns (last login September 1). I am reading that correctly?

[mostly-harmless]

To be honest, I have no idea. I just logged into civstats the first time. Is there any new info when logged in compared to ... well ... when not logged in? How do you get the info on last login of Banana?
Do we have to register our leader?
Confusing ...

But you could be right, have not seen activity from Banana in a while in the usual civstat log.
That would be bad, if the first team dropped out already.

Lets hope it is not the case.

I suggest we post something in the Hanging Gardens thread and in their sign up thread.

EDIT: I caught Will9, their leader (?) online and PMed him about it.

mh

[Sullla]

I'm not logging into Civstats (is that even possible?), just clicked on the team name and there was no "login/logout" message listed for them since September 1. Banana did login today, but as far as I can tell, that was their first activity in eight days.

Anyway, it's pure curiosity on my part. Several of the teams seem to have missed a turn here or there so far. Based on Civstats, the teams that log in the most are us (by a wide margin), followed by Templars, PAL, and Rabbits. Imperio and Banana usually have one person play the turn, and no one else so much as glances at the game.

I have no idea what this means. Probably a good thing to have multiple eyes taking a look at the game though.

[Sullla]

Relatively quiet turn (T59) for the C&D. Imperio got 21 points, all of them from their capital's borders expanding to 100 culture (twenty turns ago, on T39). Rabbits and Banana also saw pop increases; both their capitals are now size 4.

The interesting news was from the GNP chart. The Templars number went from 33 to 27, while PAL fell from 29 to 25. Since the Food/Production numbers largely stayed the same (PAL's actually went up from settling their fourth city!), we can conclude that this resulted from finishing a tech that had pre-reqs, and swapping to a new one with fewer pre-reqs or none at all.

The Templars just finished Bronze Working (one pre-req: Mining) so they have to be researching a tech with zero pre-reqs now. The only options are Fishing and Hunting. Given their situation, I'm going to guess that they are researching Hunting -> Archery right now.

PAL is even easier. They went from Writing (two pre-reqs: Pottery & Animal Husbandry) to Alphabet (one: Writing). My rough estimate is that it will take them ~20 turns to research the tech, so we should finish Iron Working slightly ahead of them.

I've also updated the first post info files in each of the Templar, Imperio, and PAL threads for easy reference. Our policymakers need to be informed on each team.

[ruff_hi]

remember the tech trade agreement is IW + Sailing for Alphabet. Last I looked, IW was 14 and Sailing was 8.

[mostly-harmless]

We will have cottages up and running soon, as well as one more city and trade route. On the down side we will have increased city maintenance.

mh

[mostly-harmless]

Sullla, as you are the one more into the tile assignments of our neighbours, here is a little thing I just discovered, that should help you a lot in that respect:
When you hover the mouse over an unimproved resource anywhere on the map it tells you the current tile production and what is required (mine, pasture) to get additional gains. So much is clear. Now if you hover your mouse above a resource in the grey fog seemingly unimproved but in reality already improved by a rivals worker you can tell that by the missing stated requirement.
An example of the two gold hills at Imperio's lands.
Both gold hills appear unmined.
However the gold in the west is missing the message (mine required) whereas the gold in the east still shows this.

So, the gold hill for Mutal is already mined, whereas the gold hill for Lakhama is not mined.
If you apply this rule to other resources as well, you can see for example that all three resources west of Lakhama (Horses, Wheat, Corn) are already improved (note that we even do not officially know that the borders have popped already) whereas the stone to their east is not quarried yet.

With this admittedly little exploit, we could even spot cities in the fog, if we find an improved resource there (for example the land to Templars east, where we are lacking a scout.

I went ahead and cluttered the map with signs accordingly.
mh

[sunrise089]

(Hopefully this won't spread too far since I don't think it's widely known)

You can do the same thing with roads in neutral territory. Take a unit and issue it a movement order to somewhere like 10 tiles away. If an enemy has been roading the land in that area the pathfinder will show a route that takes fewer turns than expected even if you can't see the road.

[regoarrarr]

Originally posted by ruff_hi
remember the tech trade agreement is IW + Sailing for Alphabet. Last I looked, IW was 14 and Sailing was 8.

I'm pretty sure we are due to finish Sailing in 2 more turns.

Edit by Ruff: Hello! I posted that comment on Sept 10th - about 20 days ago.

Keek again: Heh. I got confused by the wacky European styles dates. I saw 10-9 and thought October...

yeah. that's the ticket!