EL and Trade

[Peaster]

I've been trying to drum up some interest in a serious discussion of Early Landing strategy and Trade strategy over at Civfanatics (CFC). Thought nobody was home at Apolyton anymore, but just saw some grand old names in the recent Wonders thread. So, if anybody here is interested, please join us, either in the Strategy forum or in the GOTM forum (#110).

For me, the most interesting question is whether to focus mainly on an SSC, like solo advises in his ELG, or to focus on growth and beakers from van bonuses (my current preference). I think it is fair to say that none of us at CFC are EL masters and we'd welcome opinons.

[debeest]

Hi, Peaster. It would probably be a mistake to dispute anything solo or samson said about early landing games.

[Grigor]

Debeest - Peaster has in the past two years taken over as the reigning Civ II champion. His work builds on Solo's groundbreaking studies but has surpassed it. Solo's guide, for instance, came out before the importance of MPE had been conclusively demonstrated.

Samson remains the best Civ II theorist ever.

As I remember there was a time when early landings (38AD) were studied, and I thought Ribannah had the last word. I wonder where that thread is?

[Peaster]

Thanks for the kind words, Grigor. But I must admit that I'm still an early conquest specialist, and haven't studied early landing nearly as much as the past masters. Our EL experiment at CFC is over now [though the GOTM series continues]. I was hoping for some dramatic conclusion about EL strategy, but at the end, my thinking was pretty similar to solo's last posts; the keys are a good SSC, early trade, and well-timed ICS growth.

Zenon's last Poly game still puzzles me. He started building up his SSC VERY early, like 1000BC, and converted that to an amazing landing, approx 340AD . Less growth than solo. I'm still wondering if Zenon's is a better model.

The Poly games were played on carefully chosen, nearly ideal, maps, while the CFC games are played on fairly random maps, often without great SSC sites, usually not at Diety. I guess Zenon's method wouldn't work well on a random map, but the idea is worth trying.

[debeest]

I thought either Samson or Solo had once managed the theoretical earliest landing, using the trick of re-setting build orders during the turn change in order to build all the parts and launch in AD 1. But clear memory fails me. And I think that SlowThinker once played an early landing game using Pyramids instead of the more commonly used wonders, and beat everybody else in a pretty surprising way; so I suppose it would also be a mistake to dispute the value of early growth.