the 2 pop city start

[Inverse Icarus]

i've been folling around with bizzare strats recently, and i found one that is kind of decent. it's not as good as my usual, but it deserves some talk.

if you build yuor capital city near a decent source of shields, you can drop the worker into the city right when you start, and have a 2 pop city (one food square, one production square) and you can get a settler out rather quickly.

another method was to go about improving the terrain until the city becomes a 2, then join it. that reasoning would be it take less food to go from 1-2 then 2-3.

i tried it a few times, getting the settler out quickly is a great help for REX, but losing the worker is a real downer. it might work well if you fight an early war and steal some workers.

i play monarch, because diety cheats are horrible, so i'm not sure how the unhappiness effects it on diety or whatever.

thoughts?

[Harovan]

Some people do so indeed. It has been discussed a few months ago. Here is the thread.

[BillChin]

I think a lot depends on the terrain at the starting location, so it is difficult to generalize. On Emperor and Deity only one citizen is born happy. Building the capital over a luxury icon gives a second.

One way to go is to build roads and then join the worker. With roads (or rivers), a player can use the luxury slider to keep the population happy. In any case, using the luxury slider is a good way to go to allow the first units explore instead of garrison.

A player can also try to buy workers from other civs to make up for the joined one, but purchased workers are half speed.

As of now, I keep the original worker out there building improvements. Maybe a variant is to buy a foreign worker, join him in order to get a faster settler a bit later in the game.

[Grrr]

It really depends on the terrain. I usually try to build a worker factory (typically on flood plains) asap, and that gives me mega expansion.