(November 29th, 2013, 07:12)fluffyflyingpig Wrote: You are far too kind and gloss over the most important thing you could have done differently: bribe the mapmaker better.
Now that you have some maps, where do you rank your starting land out of the field?
Hey there!
I can perform more thorough analysis when I can actually log into game. But here's something:
When it comes to land quality in terms of tiles we we were pretty close to bottom with 2 sea-food and 5-foodhammer tile for the capital. And apart from capital we did not get a single city with 2 food resources before teching calendar (Ok, Dunkirk has dry rice 4/0 and cows 4/2, but that's the only place within the 10-tile radious of our capital and it also had to give cows away for Hastings..). After we survived the first 100 turns and managed to chop some jungle, improve calendar resources and get lucky silver pops we came closer to average (still have below average amount of food though). I haven't really seen slower starts than ours, slowcheetahs tundra looks bad though and there is something weird with suttree's capital. So I'm not saying we had the slowest start, but we are not far away from that.
So as an answer..
Early land quality: 15-18th position
Mid-game land quality: 9-14th position
When it comes to geopolitical lottery, that's easier to answer without checking the map:
From the competitive teams winners are teams that started either close to north or south edge. Meaning Plako, Commodore, Mackoti, dtay & Ichabod (Ichabod's case is slightly different). We, Pindicooter & Lewwyn will struggle because we started more central, although it seems that the lack of island expansion from retep/Bacchus/Dhaphir will help those guys. When taking no actual game events + player skill into account and just consider leader traits of neighbors here is my answer:
Strategical position: 10-16th place
Slow's start was hard and his only real expansion direction was towards EXP Ichabod, who had total monster capital so he was pretty screwed. Retep was simply squeezed. It does not look like he has played his cards well, but even then I don't envy his start. So those guys were the ones with least luck. I'm happy that we did not get those starts although I see some comeback potential in retep's land.
The way I see it we belong into same tier with other central teams with many neighbors such as suttree, Bacchus, Pindicooter etc.
From all the starts I would probably pick Ichabod's, simply great land, not too many neigbours, killable neighbors.. Did I mention that absolutely insane plains marble hill capital, which combined with RBMod-EXP gets you a worker and 2 WBs in 15 turns?
In practise that ment that after 15 turns we were already 60 hammers behind... I can tell you that's huge.. 