Cottage Start

[Simplicity]

I was messing around with the CS slingshot yesterday and the following start seemed to be very strong in comparison to my normal worker/ settler (chop) start.

Given a start city with >2 flood plains (or one floodplain plus gold/silver/gems). Build a worker. Research to Pottery. When the worker comes out, DON'T CHOP. Instead, build cottages on the flood plains (or mines on commerce specials). Let your city population grow. Research to Writing. Get a library. Start building that library. Research to Bronze. Chop the library out.

From here, the CS-slingshot is a gimme. You go through the early techs so fast it feels like the modern era.

Or you can chop AND pop rush settlers (you can combine the two to get a settler out really fast). You're making enormous amounts of commerce for the early game, and your capital city is nearing its max population.

Early cottages builds means early hamlets. Consider that the average start city is producing 10 commerce a turn (+8 from palace, +1 from initial square, +1/+0 from one more square). Two floodplain cottages give you an additional +4 commerce, which will soon become +6 commerce in ten turns (which is nothing in the early game). Combined with a library for 20 commerce. That's like having two starting CAPITALS, much less a second puny city.

If you really want to exploit this, you can do the lame trick where you only switch to Settler on the chop turns. To combine this WITH chopping out a first settler.
That would be a sickeningly powerful combo.

[more_cowbell]

This sounds really great, but at what difficulty level would this work?

Times that I have tried a slingshot on monarch level, I seem to be swarmed by hordes of barb archers about the time I'm ready to get the oracle built.

I'm pretty sure that you would need in addtion to your close flood plains an accesable copper resource so that you could be making mucho axemen to fend of the barbarian archers.

I'm not trying to be a troll, please understand, its just that the CS strategy is more or less viable depending on the difficulty you are playing on.

[Simplicity]

I'm trying this ON Monarch (and I've also had difficulties with the slingshot), and the barbarian archers are tricky but not that bad (even without copper).

Mainly because you have time after your worker comes out, but before you have libraries to build a few warriors. You've only got one city to defend, so putting three warriors in there is not hard, and single archers will lose to two defending warriors, much less three.

It's not that hard to defend against barbarian archers with warriors at Monarch. The toughest part is preventing pillaging. It can help to create warrior pickets on defendable tiles. Another mediating factor is that you tend to have lots of population in the capital to poprush warriors with.

Don't get me wrong though, adding a copper resource would make you very secure (as is always the case). Horses would also work to give chariots (you need the Wheel for Pottery).