Turnplayed Thread #4

[Sullla]

I don't know, and with less than an hour left I don't want to make any emergency swaps... We'll have to spend next turn figuring it out. Sorry.

FYI, Imperio also simply gifted Feudalism to Templars this turn. I swear, that team has played SO badly in this game, only to have everyone keep giving them techs! Well, it's pretty infuriating, to be honest. Imperio also essentially gifted Math to Rabbits at the start of the turn, then someone gifted Rabbits another Classical tech (almost certainly Imperio) later in the turn. I'm not quite positive what that second one was, but it looks like it might have been Construction!

Anyway, it's clear that Imperio and Templars are going to ally together and attack us. We may as well start emailing PAL and Banana and forming counter diplomatic plans. PAL and Banana will both be less than pleased at losing trade route income with us, and PAL is going to be pretty pissed at seeing Imperio gift Rabbits important military techs for nothing. If we're not going to win this game, we may as well work together with PAL (who has played excellently) to the common ruin of the idiots that make up Imperio and Templars.

[Dreylin]

Um, Looks like Templars are trying to cut our supply lines....

[sunrise089]

Absolutely nothing we can do about that short of declaring war. Fortunately we won't loose any resources, but it will mean the south is on its own militarily. Of course it sort of has to be considering the size of the Imperio stack.

In terms of civics, I think we should adopt a religion and swap to organized, but doing it this turn isn't crucial.

Build wise we've got to be careful to make enough units. Imperio completed as many as four units this turn and Cape Town will only make one. We've got to make some attempt to keep parity, as hard as it is when faced with a 2v1 attack.

[Sullla]

All right, let's move on to the next turn.

- I actually did see the Templar movement of the two spears (and shame on you Templars, for moving in the final 5 minutes of a game like this! Such an action clearly breaks the spirit of the double-move rule, if not the letter. ) and reacted to it by moving one of the maces in Cape Town to the tile next to them before the timer ticked over. We can still move back into Cape Town on the current turn if desired, or remain in position to hit the Templar spears if they move inland on a pillaging mission.

This was the best option I could see to do on short notice, with no time to consult anyone else. sunrise, let me know what you think we should do here. Now on to the actual T130:

- We finished Colossus in Mellow, as expected.

- Imperio finished Statue of Zeus in Uxmal. We had a good idea from C&D that they were going after that one, but now it's confirmed.

- Pink finished its whipped mace (Charsi) who is fortified in the city. Next build was tentatively set to catapult, please advise.

- China Beach finished its whipped horse archer (War Emblem) who moved the max six moves towards the expected front. CB has gone back to its forge (5t), and we would really like to spend the Golden Age building that... but again, we may have to go back to another horse archer here depending on how things develop.

- Cape Town finished catapult (Buttercup), giving us 5 cats in the besieged city. I have the city set to war elephant at the moment, as we get 62 shields there this turn - not enough for a mace. *IF* we don't get declared war on this turn, we should build the elephant, as the cheapest 8-strength unit. If we do get declared on, we will lose our ivory, and then will need to swap over to catapult here (we can do cat/mace over the next two turns here, assuming no pillaging).

I also already mentioned moving the one maceman above, who can still move UNTIL we get declared upon, at which time the warfare movement rules will apply.

- Something Fishy is working on a catapult, due in 2t. I really don't think we need to whip here, as it can do 3t cats right now, and that frees up Pink to work on stronger units that would benefit more from a barracks.

- Green finished its whipped setter (which moved towards the red spot) and is regrowing again while building forge. Nothing more special from our smaller/more developing cities.

- I seem to have goofed on the tech selection. I wanted to pick "nothing" again, but the game forced me to select something, and I accidentally clicked on Theology. So it seems we put 21 beakers into that tech, and can't remove them now. My sincere apologies for that.

- And in more bad news, our warrior Jennifer on the eastern continent moved next to a barb axe in the desert this turn. Not much I could do about that, sorry guys.

- I'd like to snap pictures of all the cities for a State of the Empire thread later, so I'm just going to put some overview shots here for now:

North


South:


I can already tell it's going to be a busy turn, so let's get to work.

[Sullla]

Forgot to mention. Banana gained 18 points this turn, which surely indicates that they discovered Feudalism (I forgot to check). Would someone please make the offer for them to trade it to us in-game?

In other news, we have 216g to play around with this turn as far as upgrades go. Remember that we will also be able to upgrade archers to longbows once the trade with Banana goes down. How should we best employ that money then? (Aside from saving it to do deficit research, which would be the best option, but which doesn't look likely now.) Also remember that we lose the ability to upgrade spears to pikes if Imperio and Templars both declare on us.

I think Pink's spear and Cape Town's axe are probably the two greatest needs right now. sunrise, what would you do here?

[ruff_hi]

I think we need a galley for several reasons ...

• troop transport to and from Cape
• transport our GG (when we get one) to Cape

However, were are we pulling this galley from? Any suggestions? Is there any whip overflow that might be put into a galley?

Re our GG - what is best ... a super medic in Cape would make that city virtually impregnable.

[ruff_hi]

I seem to have goofed on the tech selection. I wanted to pick "nothing" again, but the game forced me to select something, and I accidentally clicked on Theology. So it seems we put 21 beakers into that tech, and can't remove them now. My sincere apologies for that.

Don't worry about it - best to learn that this 'trick' doesn't seem to work with Bitboss when there is only 21 beakers in play instead of 200.

Do you have 'minimized popups' checked? - it moves city build / tech requests to after you have moved all of your units.

[sunrise089]

Right Ruff, I always play with minimized popups for that very reason.

Re: the mace moved down from Cape Town, that was the right move, but we have to be careful about turn order. Of course Templars can't declare war for 12 hours, but Imperio might be able to argue that move pushed us to the back of the queue.

Upgrades: the easy point is that we should upgrade the Longbows after everything else, since that can't be cut off and they're just defenders (crossbows are better as attackers). We'll loose Iron before we loose copper, so if we want to upgrade this turn I'd do the spear->pike upgrades. Archer->crossbow is appealing but obviously we loose little by waiting since they can be turned into longbows instead. We should also get our axes promoted to maces if we can afford it, but we don't need to until someone actually declares and our copper is in danger.

Good moves Sullla!

[Zeviz]

Should we do an Elephant or mace in Pink? Templars have many small stacks instead of an SoD, so fighting units seem to be more important than catapults.

[ruff_hi]

just logged in ... a couple of things:

• got Feudalism from Banana (said thankyou in-game)
• player #6 (wabbits) logged in while I was there - got a message that they have a different version of some of the game files (I have a screenshot if you are interested)
• Looked at Saxon on the Beach - this is one city were we can whip a galley from - it grows to size 4 in 3 turns and a galley (50 hammers) will cost us 2 citizens
• Pink Dot: It doesn't have walls - they are currently a 1 turn build - I think that might be a good option

[sunrise089]

Walls are fine. I agree we want to emphasize strength-8 units in the south, especially so long as our maces will have odds versus everything.

I'm surprised it was a Rabbits player with a different game file message. Me and all the PAL guys will generate that message because MP players use our own non-official patch now to prevent games from going out-of-sync when directly attacking a city from ships. Yes, Firaxis completely broke that feature in the last patch and we had to fix it ourselves

[ruff_hi]

actually - the walls can wait - build units that require iron or ivory while we still have them.

[Sullla]

Guys, any feedback on upgrading units? That's one of the more important questions I'd like to get some reactions on. My gut feeling at present is that we should upgrade the remaining axe in Cape Town to a mace, and the spear in Pink to a pike. And we should probably do it before this turn ends, in case the other teams declare war on us as the timer is approaching zero. Any thoughts on that?

[sunrise089]

Both those upgrades make good sense Sullla. The spear->pike upgrades are more pressing due to the threat of cut-off iron, but the axeman->mace upgrade helps us more versus Imperio's stack. The real question is whether Imperio plans to declare this turn or wait a bit more. Since I support upgrading more or less all of our obsolete front-line units to counter the effects that Imperio seems to be going all military versus us while we focus half our cities in infrastructure I think both of your upgrades sound good.

[T-hawk]

Another topic: Any interest in making a temporary Vassalage switch for a few turns during this Golden Age? Our capital needs to be in Great Person mode at the moment, so the opportunity cost for Bureaucracy is considerably less, with fewer commerce and hammers to multiply, and also we're in cash mode so the academy is idle. Meanwhile, we're considerably over the free unit count and building units like crazy, both of which render Vassalage quite attractive. Any opinions?