Island starts

[couerdelion]

In the last two successive games, I have started as a lone civilisation on an island so I have given a little thought to how a game should be adapted to these conditions.

First of all, here are the key differences in the game style following your discovery that you are alone.

1) There are practically no military threats to your free expansion on this island. Your speed of filling the available space should be set with reference to your empire costs
2) You won’t be getting religion from another civilisation. Work out how you will get your own
3) You will have no trading options with resources so learn to use what you have available. With the former, you will quickly be able to work out your civilisation limits for happiness and health and will almost certainly have to use other available means to reach maximum levels on both. It is possible that monarchy may be your own real option for happiness.
4) Tech trading is delayed until someone finds you or, ideally, you find them.

In short, the island situation is one where you have a licence to build so early forges will be quite useful while barracks and military units will be particularly useless.

Two other areas where you will want to look at seriously are wonders and great people. The low military will work perfectly with Pacifism as a driver for generating GPs and an early GP generator specialist city would be of great use. In fact, it looks like you really will be looking for specialisation along the lines of science city/gold city/GP generator/production-wonder city.

Key wonder for island civ – Colossus.

I would be interested in other thoughts on what things you should look out for in this situation

[johnmcd]

I agree with plenty of vertical growth with spread when it is comfortably affordable rather than for its own sake.

I also think, because of the island nature and the high likelihood of falling behind on tech that a culture win is the most sensible to go for.

[Swiss Pauli]

Assuming the AI is quite distant from your island then I find the following:

Without another Civ to light your locality, Barbs can be a pain, especially if they put an early 3-archer-town just where you need to expand;

Research-wise, you need to focus more on the bottom half of the tech tree (post-writing);

Check regularly on the demographics, especially when the island is fully settled. Your land-mass coverage will tell you whether your island is big enough to give you a shot at victory, or whether you need to load up the galleons for expansion/war.

[couerdelion]

Barbarians on an island – mere nuisance value.

It would seem that the approach he is simply to keep enough units spread out around the island on lookout points so that the whole land mass is sufficiently lit. That way you can avoid ANY problems with them cropping up. I’ve even left cities completely defenceless when I’ve known that there is nothing that could ever come their way and with no threat from barbarian galleys you can also save time building those useless things.

This situations gives you the one major advantage of being alone. You don’t really need to build up a military yet so can concentrate on maximising your economy and territorial expansion really only needs to occur when it benefits your total commerce.

This would seem to also suggest a vertical growth approach

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Swiss Pauli Research-wise, you need to focus more on the bottom half of the tech tree (post-writing);

Some of this may be unnecessary. Just a few that I can think of would be archery, hunting (possibly), archery, monotheism, alphabet, horse riding, construction and even iron working.

The standard CS or Philo slingshots light up most of the techs you want before you back-fill the techs you need (eg pottery, animals, fishing etc). After that, I’d pretty much bee-line optics and backfill the rest when you find someone to trade with.

[Quillan]

I've had this happen a couple of times. I agree with you on the Colossus; in this situation you have to maximize commerce and thus research. Barbarians are a pain, so make lots of warriors/scouts and keep the entirety of the island under observation even if you can't afford to settle all of it yet. If you are lucky, you may have access to a couple of luxury items on your island, but again you may not. Gold is the best resource for this start, IMO, with silver next, because of the bonus commerce.

[couerdelion]

So I was lucky

On one island I got the following

Horses (1)
Copper (1)
Stone (1)
Wheat (4)
Pigs (3)
Fish (3/4)
Clams (2?)
Silver (1)

That's one big happy island

With five cities I was able to keep all of the island under observation with just four units posted on sentry.

[Fallenhero]

First time caller long time listener.... I have played many Island starts lately(standard, continents, Mon) and have found these basics help.

1. Make sure you're on a isolated continent. It sounds simple but all it takes one missed tile of coastal water connection to ruin your day. Also, a galley might spot the cultural borders of another civ or the coastal waters of another island just out of reach.

2. Once you know you're alone and get the basic techs for land developement it's writing for libraries and a bee-line for optics. You need the caravel asap both to locate another island to settle and to start trading techs. That means while the boats are building you research Alphabet so you have something to trade when you get somewhere. After that I bee-line for Astronomy so I can trade resources and settle other islands.

3. If I can get stone I go for The Pyramids. The extra pop representation allows can make the difference in keeping up economically with the outside world. The Great Lighthouse is also good to get since coastal cities will be a priority. I find the Colossus to be only ok because I beeline for Astronomy which negates it.


That's it for now.

[maubuchon]

First post in the forum, but I had a very interesting start last night and really want to share it. I was playing as Elizabeth on Prince difficulty and started on an island that was mostly (60% or so?) desert spaces. It did, however, have 8 gold deposits. I later found 3 bronze deposits, but no iron anywhere. Some crabs, some fish... lots of desert.

[platypotamus]

Originally posted by Fallenhero

2. Once you know you're alone and get the basic techs for land developement it's writing for libraries and a bee-line for optics. You need the caravel asap both to locate another island to settle and to start trading techs. That means while the boats are building you research Alphabet so you have something to trade when you get somewhere. After that I bee-line for Astronomy so I can trade resources and settle other islands.

That's been my strategy thusfar on this type of map, and it works really well. If you get to optics significantly before any other Civ, you can often times get the foreign advisor screen to show you having contact with every other civ, but few if any of them have contact with anyone aside from you.

THIS IS HUGE!

If you have alphabet, you can now trade techs freely, and they can't. I've found that it's relatively easy to set a beeline up at that point (usually Astronomy as Fallenhero suggest, but occasionally I'll want another stop first). As you are beelining, you are also checking for tech trades almost every turn, selling off your older techs for other techs you skipped, and the excess gold of the richer civs.

You hit Astronomy, and you now have the first crack at setting up resource trades with everyone, because you were the first to Astronomy. Which means that so-and-so's extra banana is going to you, and not to some other civ. Equally huge.

Finally, since you scouted everyone long ago, you've picked an appropriate target for your invasion, and you've been building up an army that can board your first X galleons immediately and begin assaulting another continent. You take over a second continent before anyone else could even assault yours, because no one else even has galleons, and you are in great shape.

[snafuc4]

Re: Island starts

Originally posted by couerdelion
would be interested in other thoughts on what things you should look out for in this situation

2 things:

How big is the island?

How close are your neighbours?

I would take the opportunity to build a large army & navy after certain strategic buildings are done. Just because you are on an 'island' doesn't mean you're not on a Continents map; either way conquest (land, pop, WHY) is your likely victory strategy. If you're /extremely/ lucky & the AI makes all the wrong moves you may get by with a culture victory, but I doubt it..

[uberfish]

Send a workboat or galley out to scout all round your shoreline as soon as you can afford it, there are sometimes shallows where you can cross to another island or continent which aren't easy to spot from land.

[Urban Ranger]

Workboats can be excellent in these circumstances.

[couerdelion]

Something I would have missed.

Originally posted by uberfish
Send a workboat or galley out to scout all round your shoreline as soon as you can afford it, there are sometimes shallows where you can cross to another island or continent which aren't easy to spot from land.

Just have to make sure there are no barbarian cities around. Their galleys can be extremely annoying in these situation because if you are indeed alone you don't want to be wasting time building galleys but should rather hop straight to caravels and use the intervening time to build more useful things for a coastal city.

The idea of exploring the world with a work boat is rather amusing

[johnmcd]

On tiny islands it's pretty easy to circumnavigate with a workboat. It's just a shame the AI isn't that clever with it's navel invasions really, it needs to build three times the units to take with it usually. If the troop ships were cheap enough to represent a logisitical hurdle rather than a production hurdle that would help I think.