Your Start

[Arrian]

I might be more inclined to let our borders pop the hut, and use the warrior for additional exploration (and possibly finding/popping more huts). It won't take long for our borders to pop that hut...

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Am I correct in assuming that we will be building a warrior as our first build, for defense/scouting purposes? We work a fp for quick growth to size 2, and then maybe use the second citizen on the forested hill for max production to finish the warrior and then switch to a second fp and punch out a worker?

-Arrian

[NicodaMax]

should be just 5 turns to pop the hut. Our warrior could go 1 down and to the right, to reveal as much terrain as possible (i'm assuming we'd be settling on the hills plain up north).

[NicodaMax]

Maybe we should work the fp and then 2 fp as we grow to maximize gold=beakers output in order to get that early religion, and let the warrior take its time...

[Arrian]

Well, I thought the point was not to take defense lightly - thus "taking our time" building a 2nd warrior might not be the best idea.

By building on the plains hill (ph) and working a floodplain (fp), we get 2 hammers/turn and +3 food/turn. Nice. Although we do lose one turn up-front. If we're thinking of chasing a religion, that puts us behind the 8 ball.

Tech... ok, we prolly want to get a cottage or two up on those floodplains pretty quickly. But I also think that a farm or two on the floodplains would be a good idea. Further, pottery requires the wheel (one of our start techs) plus either fishing or agriculture. Agriculture. Farms. Yeah.

Going for an early religion means delaying that a bit - we would need to research 2 techs. In that case, it would make sense to open with several warrior builds whilst growing. Downside obviously is that we'd be sacrificing even better growth/production in the medium term b/c we won't get any farms or cottages up for quite some time.

Going for BW first doesn't delay terrain improvement much, really. It's just one tech (albeit a fairly expensive one). We're gonna want at least 1 warrior, maybe 2, before we build a worker. Probably 2... one more to explore, one to stay home. At 2 h/t, that's 15 turns of warrior building, which means we're at size 3 when we start the worker, right? I like that. In 15 turns, we'd already have BW and would be starting on a worker tech (agr, IMHO). It has a certain synergy...

-Arrian

[Metaliturtle]

Who else is going to chase a religion though? If it is one or two opponents, the better start would still lead to religion, if it's nobody, it won't matter much at all. It sounded to me like at least 3 teams will be going for military stuff anyway.

Early religion + warrior builds also means that a rush won't be as devastating should it happen.

just my $0.02

[alva]

That's not a bad start, not bad at all.


Snoops, just a small request for further(?) screenies, please turn on grids next time.

- Agreed to settling on the hill (8).
- Let cultural borders pop the hut (btw, do we have any info on wether it yields different results from units (not scout) popping huts?).

The big decission me need to make is to religious or not imo.

[Arrian]

Alva,

Dunno about hut popping... that's part of why I figured wait for the borders, though (on the off-chance it's better, plus we get to make better scouting moves with the warrior).

Correct that religion or no religion is the major choice. Settling on the plains hill and building a warrior first seem rather likely to be the team's decision (though many have yet to weigh in on that).

-Arrian

[NicodaMax]

For knowing whether to go for the religion or not, it might also be relevant to check demografics on the other teams once we have the save (i.e. how fast they're researching). If we take 1 turn to found our city, by then chances are most teams will already have done so (we're 4th in the turn order).

[DeepO]

snoopy, a request: can we have a more zoomed in pic, at high resolution?

We should be able to see more of the surrounding tiles, while now it's hard to make out if it something is desert or not.

My suggestion: someone make this into a scenario, please. And start using that to get a better feel of what moving might mean. There's a lot of fp nearby, moving to the desert hill will be good for production, but a real burden to health.

DeepO

[DeepO]

As to initial build order: worker would be nice, but we might go for a warrior first too.

The problem is that if we want to go for religion, we need to take the fp or desert hill early on (as the forest won't produce commerce), which will shunt production until we grow to size 2.

I hope there is some resource hidden by FoW, as our current commerce situation is excellent for the long term, but certainly not great right now. My guess, knowing CIV starts, is that there will be at least one resource within city radius of where we stand right now. It might appear later, though, once we get the tech needed.

DeepO

[DeepO]

As to what happens next: I'd like us to move our warrior before settling (doh), which means we need to pick a direction. The hut will be popped by our capital, or can be taken later if we decide to move, so that's not important.

Which means we have to move our warrior to somewhere where it will give us as much useful map information as possible... two basic directions: 8 or 2
(PS for newer folk: we tend to use the num. keyboard when describing where a unit should go. '8' means straight North one tile, '2' means South. '889' means N, N, NE.)

I think 2 might be the way to go: North of our starting spot, there seems to be more desert. To our West, there seems to be plains. And South there seems to be plains, with some more forest. West, perhaps grass...

The hill at 2 should give us some idea of our surroundings, and will reveal forests, possibly something good in those. It will reveal 3 tiles in initial range. moving 8 should reveal 5, though, and it's quite likely that one of those fps contains wheat or corn. There's also the possibility that one of the hills contains gold or silver. Lot's of choices, and we haven't started yet

DeepO

[DeepO]

Just now done with first impressions... some debate (sorry if I copy stuff)

Originally posted by Krill
The max happiness we can get without more resources is size 6. Alternate between using 4 flood plains, 2 mined plains hills, and 3 flood plains and 3 mined plains hills, gives us an average of 11spt. If we have a bit of foos to spare, we could get the Oracle 8 turns after discovering PH.

We can get it in 7 with 2 forest chops, well timed probably in 6 as well. We can build up our food surpluss first, then work production only for 6 turns... who cares if we run a -6fpt as long as we don't lose pop.

Agri is a waste IMO, 7 turns to irrigate a flood plain for +1 fpt? never get the hills mined in time, could ojnly irrigate about 1 fp, and it wastes time researching a none critical tech, delaying the oracle...

I agree. If we go for the Oracle, we need a worker asap (might be at size 2, though, giving us a chance for a religion). This start certainly lends itself for a go at it, however I'm not sure it's the right path to follow. Terribly low on defense, and there is no forest in sight to boost our defenses with.

If we wanted to go for the throat in a more conventional manner, go for pottery early, and try to get two workers, cottage the area up, and chop a few settlers.

I think cottages will need to be very high on our list of things to get (we're FIN!), and as there doesn't seem to be animals nearby, that means we go for agri soon. In that case, we need 2 workers, and building 2 before our first settler certainly seems a good option.

The problem with such a strategy is, that cottage heavy in this situation will mean production few: We need to have that grass hill mined asap, as using mined plain hills stops growth fast.

-------------------------------

The other thing to consider, is that this site can make for a great GP factory, if it wasn't for the health problem. There's plenty of food, and plenty of production for wonders around. We need to work out a strategy when it comes to our GPs right now, from the start.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Blake
Lack of resources can be a real blessing, we could easily get away with just mining (which we already have) and pottery (we already have wheel).

Woops. Of course, we've got the wheel... pottery is just one step away. If not going for a religion, pottery and hunting seem to be the only tech choices for now.

This means we can "afford" more research in other fields, such as for religion, scouts and skirmishers. Really, it's an ideal mali start.

Agree. We don't need the Oracle, if we play this well.

We could probably get away without chopping much at all since mining those two plains hills gives a fair pile of shields. There's also enough good, easily improved tiles that pop-rush is of questionable value, at least at the capital. With our Skirmishers Bronze Working could be deferred slightly.

Forests don't produce commerce... And I wouldn't write off poprushing yet. This start would be a good start if some wheat shows up in range... for now, it's just a decent start, with plenty of opportunities.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by NicodaMax
Maybe we should work the fp and then 2 fp as we grow to maximize gold=beakers output in order to get that early religion, and let the warrior take its time...

We need to sim that, but on first sight, we build a first warrior in about the same time as we can grow to size 3. Maximum commerce can be critical right about now: every gold counts. (so no forested hills if we can avoid it)

DeepO