Yeah, hindsight is 20/20. I don't think moving was wrong, I'm more interested in the reasoning we have used to justify previous moves, and the decisions we take when we have a lack of information are one subset that I particularly enjoy working on. How to play starts and value different options with and without information is something we will never solve in CIV, IMO.
On this map, we're pretty much settling cities for one food resource max spacing, later filler cities are going to get dropped down in a few places for no food resources.
The problem with the river mines is we only have three, and we need to use both food resources to feed them (OK, we don't need the 3/2 plains hill sheep). Then there is the knock on problem with the copper which IMO makes it a 100% necessity: That copper city is not even close to viable without stealing the pig and having a granary. What we did with the whip from 4>3 is what enabled us to get a joint third fastest second city out and to get the food resources hooked, and that still only places us middle of the pack for crop yield. If we had grown the capital to size 5, not whipped at all, and found the extra 13 worker turns for the mines then the capital would be making an extra 2 commerce and 4 hammers per turn but the third city would be founded about when we found the fourth city with the whip micro, and that city would be so much slower on development, that it couldn't provide the workers to help chop Oracle (which is actually the only value of settling city 3 where it is, to aid the snowball). And we couldn't settle city 3 without teching Agriculture anyway, and without Wheel we can't hook it to trade network and lose the trade network: Pottery is only 5 turns of tech, it's the other costs of Agriculture and Wheel that take most of the turns.
Actually, if I look and try to find a third city that has either a pasture or seafood resource, the closest one is the plains cow to the SW 6 tiles away, then the grass forest to the east 7 tiles away and the crab to the west 7 tiles away. So maybe picking a Fishing civ wasn't the right move, because anyone playing this start has to research Agriculture.
(Also, having played the sim to T60 for Oracle, if we actually don't go for Oracle for whatever reason, it frees up a lot of the micro and we could feasibly settle the Furs around T65-ish, with the capital and Copper city working a bunch of cottages so we don't go broke. Then we could chop a work boat and galley up there for the island city. I wonder if it's worth exploring how feasible this is).
On this map, we're pretty much settling cities for one food resource max spacing, later filler cities are going to get dropped down in a few places for no food resources.
The problem with the river mines is we only have three, and we need to use both food resources to feed them (OK, we don't need the 3/2 plains hill sheep). Then there is the knock on problem with the copper which IMO makes it a 100% necessity: That copper city is not even close to viable without stealing the pig and having a granary. What we did with the whip from 4>3 is what enabled us to get a joint third fastest second city out and to get the food resources hooked, and that still only places us middle of the pack for crop yield. If we had grown the capital to size 5, not whipped at all, and found the extra 13 worker turns for the mines then the capital would be making an extra 2 commerce and 4 hammers per turn but the third city would be founded about when we found the fourth city with the whip micro, and that city would be so much slower on development, that it couldn't provide the workers to help chop Oracle (which is actually the only value of settling city 3 where it is, to aid the snowball). And we couldn't settle city 3 without teching Agriculture anyway, and without Wheel we can't hook it to trade network and lose the trade network: Pottery is only 5 turns of tech, it's the other costs of Agriculture and Wheel that take most of the turns.
Actually, if I look and try to find a third city that has either a pasture or seafood resource, the closest one is the plains cow to the SW 6 tiles away, then the grass forest to the east 7 tiles away and the crab to the west 7 tiles away. So maybe picking a Fishing civ wasn't the right move, because anyone playing this start has to research Agriculture.
(Also, having played the sim to T60 for Oracle, if we actually don't go for Oracle for whatever reason, it frees up a lot of the micro and we could feasibly settle the Furs around T65-ish, with the capital and Copper city working a bunch of cottages so we don't go broke. Then we could chop a work boat and galley up there for the island city. I wonder if it's worth exploring how feasible this is).