Part 250: Mechanics - Graphs!

Here is a map with everyone's capital on it. I hope this helps everyone figure out where we all are. Just so we're clear, this is a wraparound map so the edges all connect (for example, if everyone expands at the same rate then pan will border mictlan and sauromatia).



Graphs
You can tell a great deal from graphs. These are the graphs as of turn 7. I'll give a brief description of what I can glean from each of these. From left to right the flags are Arco, Sauro, TC, Mictlan, Pan, Hinnom and Lanka.

Provinces
There are a couple of interesting things you can see here. First, you can see that Hinnom must have either an awake SC or expanded blind with their starting army. You can tell from the dominion graph below that Hinnom does not have an awake pretender so I must have expanded blind with my starting army.

Mictlan's expansion is worse than I would expect so I'll be curious to see why in this LP. Arcoscephale's is quite good so I suspect an awake SC pretender (we'll see why I'm right in other graphs). You can tell Lanka is running out of expansion room from how their graph flatlines and you can see that Pan probably ran into trouble with losing one of their expansion armies or dead-ending at some point by the kink in their graph.


Forts
Nothing to see here, move along. I wouldn't be surprised to see a second fort at this point from some of these nations/players so it's nice that nobody has one yet.


Income
This is where you can make some guesses at scales and who overtaxed when. Nothing all that helpful but nice information to keep in mind.

From turn two income you can see that Pan and Hinnom didn't overtax. From turn one income you can see that Pan and Arco's scales aren't as good for income as anyone else's but that everyone else has taken very good scales.


Gem Income
Nothing exciting here. Pan almost certainly found a site that doesn't require any searching to find.


Research
Here is where things get interesting. You can see Arco's research really took off from turn one. That means Arco has an awake pretender. Given the amount of research it's generating I suspect it has quite a few magic paths but I'm a little confused initially because I don't think Arco needs an awake rainbow pretender for research. You can see TC has used most of their cap only mage recruitment to lead their armies.


Dominion
Here is where we can be really sure Arco has an awake SC pretender. Arco is spreading dominion at the same rate Hinnom is and I'm sacrificing 2-3 slaves a turn for an additional 4-6 temple checks at dom 10 a turn. Initially, I would guess TC, Sauro and Pan also have awake pretenders but they might just have taken high dominion and as Sauro and TC start to plateau I reconsider. Then Pan starts to plateau too and I begin to think it's probably just Arco that has an awake pretender. Look at how Arco's Dom is just shooting straight up.


Army Size
Let's not look at this OK?

Most folks are just generally going up but Hinnom and Mictlan are the two nations to note here. Mictlan's poor expansion combined with that little dip in their army graph make me think they probably lost at least one group when trying to expand. For Hinnom, I know that that dip in my graph is when I lost Victor's Villains to some foolishness. The big jump back up is just another group of mercs that really isn't much of an indication of force. As the game progresses this particular graph will be less and less useful.