To give you some background of this exciting decision (there is not much else to discuss yet), here is a rough analysis we made to help us:
To sum it up, we ended up liking roughly one third of the civs more than Persia and considered one third significantly weaker based onour start, settings, etc. We are pretty much in the middle of the pack of civ quality, probably a bit below.
At the end of the day the rough calculations indicated that we would need to be quite lucky to get a significant improvement to our civ quality while the chance of ending up with a weaker civ is bigger. And in this case the risk scenarios definitely outweigh the positives as starting with e.g. Fishing/Mysticism would be suicidal. With Persia's solid Agri/Hunting we at least know that we can play a competitive early game and should not be terribly behind by T50
Btw, do not judge me for the very rough UU/UB evaluation. It was done in 3 mins without remembering what half of the units/buildings do. Conclusion was clear enough so there was no need to fine-tune this further..
![[Image: pb38%20persia%20choice.png?dl=0]](https://dl.dropbox.com/s/2prvg107ccju9kp/pb38%20persia%20choice.png?dl=0)
To sum it up, we ended up liking roughly one third of the civs more than Persia and considered one third significantly weaker based onour start, settings, etc. We are pretty much in the middle of the pack of civ quality, probably a bit below.
At the end of the day the rough calculations indicated that we would need to be quite lucky to get a significant improvement to our civ quality while the chance of ending up with a weaker civ is bigger. And in this case the risk scenarios definitely outweigh the positives as starting with e.g. Fishing/Mysticism would be suicidal. With Persia's solid Agri/Hunting we at least know that we can play a competitive early game and should not be terribly behind by T50
Btw, do not judge me for the very rough UU/UB evaluation. It was done in 3 mins without remembering what half of the units/buildings do. Conclusion was clear enough so there was no need to fine-tune this further..