It’s time for my 7th turn of LT30.

Exploration

I know other nations in all my directions now. Soon I have explored all my borderlands and I can start preparing and planning my next cities. I don’t see much reason to explorer too far away since LT30 has no huts and I’ll most likely just loose my explorers somewhere far far away. They are much better scouts anyway.

Research

I learned Pottery today. My scientists are now focusing on Alphabet and goal was to get Writing for diplomats.

In LT30 you need diplomats to establish embassy with other players. This enables sharing tech, gold, map and other diplomatic operations with other players.

It’s actually hard to decide if I should research Horseback Riding or Bronze Working instead of Alphabet. Most players are probably researching for horsemen. I’ll need to do that choice this turn, since in LT30 changing tech has a penalty and you could loose bulbs (or is there penalty?).

[Update: There is no penalty for changing tech targets in LT30. Two days ago I thought that there was because initial settings for the server were wrongly written and some settings were not activated. For my initial test games I had noticed that and fixed the settings for myself. Nobody fixed it for LT30…)]

I’m not yet sure in details how research costs are counted in LT30. I know it depends on how many others have the tech. Because of that it might not make sense to research tech that a lot of people are researching because you could get it much cheaper after they have it — or you could trade it with them after Writing.

[Update: Freeciv games can use different ruleset settings. One of the settings that controls tech in LT30 is tech_leakage and it is set to 1 which means “Technology cost is reduced depending on the number of players which already know the tech and you have an embassy with.”]

Just 4 hours until turn change. I’ll need to think fast.

Cities

This turn I didn’t have much time to put in it and times like these it’s good to have easily available plans, so turns take less time to do.

I use Google Docs in helping me to plan and prepare my turns. It’s a great tool. I can use it as well from my media TV as from my desktop. It’s almost always in hand.

Defence

I am moving my Warriors to strategic points on my borders while building more Warriors. For this I have two cities with high production. Actually I planned to have only one in active use but for the moment I’m using two.

As you might have noticed, details of my defence are somewhat blurry and come with a delay. I cannot tell everything here for obvious reasons.

Because Warriors are cheap and take only 10 shields to build, they are quite useful in the beginning to establish basic defence in your cities.

In Despotism you can build three warriors or workers in all of your cities without shield upkeeps.

Demographic Report

It sure looks like there starts to be variations between players now.

I hope I’m in full speed tomorrow and I can continue my plan to write once a day a journal and an another specific article to something else.

I am also planning to start writing the actual book weekly based on previewed blog posts from the site — I’ll be at GitHub pages as a draft then.