Alone, or Shared Starting Location?

[DaveMcW]

The GL works even better in isolation than usual! You don't get any techs until you have 2 contacts, but you can get techs past Education when you make contact.

You can't get away with zero research though, since you'll fall behind in infrastructure.

[Arrian]

Vulture,

Was that a 1.29 game or a PTW 1.14 game? The reason I ask is that my experience with PTW is that the AI will now aggressively sell contact with the human player to other AIs. Meet one via suicide galley, meet all within a couple of turns.

-Arrian

[Egbert]

In my, admittedly fairly limited experience with this game, it seems that difficulty level plays a part in deciding whether it is better to start isolated or sharing a continent.

I think isolated is certainly better at Chieftain and advantageous at Warlord. This is because you can outresearch all other civs without trading techs. Meanwhile you have no need to think about whether or not your neigbour might launch a sneak attack and get lucky with one of your cities. In other you can just build like hell without bothering about military units, have dozen cities undefended may be OK if no neighbours, save money and build stuff first.

An isolated start at monarch means you fall so far behind on tech that you will probably be deadmeat (unless you are a good enough player who can buy or fight his way out of trouble). The only way I have been able to keep up at Monarch is sharing an island, swap techs and attack someone in force to grab land, cities and workers.

It seems, to me, that the answer may depend upon your ability and your strategy and the difficulty level. If I am to have a chance of winning at Regent or Monarch then I must have neighbours to trade techs with and then to rape and plunder (but I am not a good player and I do not yet have strategies clearly worked out). OTH At Warlord I am very peaceful but build like hell so am better off without neighbours.

[vulture]

Originally posted by Arrian
Was that a 1.29 game or a PTW 1.14 game? The reason I ask is that my experience with PTW is that the AI will now aggressively sell contact with the human player to other AIs. Meet one via suicide galley, meet all within a couple of turns.

That was with 1.29. I was hoping that the French would sell contact around, even if it lessened the value of the Great Library. As it happens, I got a few more techs out of it due to them being so tight fisted.