[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Isn't it possible to pop religion from a hut?

No...

Thinking out loud while waiting for turns to roll and scouting info to come in:

As we're IMP does it make more sense for us to pack our cities really tight and have fewer resources per city? ...

When we think about tile yields, having two size 1 cities working say, dry corn each is more efficient than a size 2 city working both tiles. 2 cities get combined a food surplus of 10, while the size 2 city only gets a surplus of 8. Two cities also benefit from having lower "% of growth achieved / food" compared to one monster city and thanks to city tile also produces 1 extra hammer.

Buuut the price for those yields is an extra settler and extra maintenance. And the city maintenance will surely be an issue when we reach ~10+ cities regardless of the distance and at that point having 10 quality cities is better than having 12 cities sharing the land of 8 quality cities. That said, overlapping food resources will always be useful and using cheap IMP settlers to find 1 or 2 extra fishing villages sounds good to me..

On tech path:
- Mining - BW - Wheel <-> Agri - AH <-> Pottery - Writing - Maths - Currency <-> Calendar - CoL

(+ HBR + Archery + maybe IW for our Jaguars..+ I could see us getting early-ish Monarchy with this capital)

Yeah, I think very similarly, probably we will delay Calendar after Currency + CoL unless there are a lot more important resources in the fog (we found gems this turn that will be a great help in dealing with happiness issues). The timing and need of military techs will totally depend on our neighbor situation..

[Old Harry]

I supose is not a spoiler anymore, and if it is if i want i can present it anyway, in that Ha rus i had another 9 axes and i think 8 or 10 cats(dont remeber exaclty) so nope for a complet anihilation of an oponenet i would never recomand just Ha, casue spear get great odds on them and can be easily whiped even in rb mod.Well if Nakor is neighbour..., might work.

Hey, any chance you want to dedlurk us Mackoti we can offer... um... well... er... I guess arguments over hammers and food is all we've got .

Just for a little bit more spoiler info - how many HA's did you have at the time? I didn't realise you'd got cats too - but as Fintourist says it was the speed and disguise of your initial strike that did for m_h, the rest was almost inevitable once you'd chopped his empire in half...

BTW we've got a list of neighbours we'd like a bit further up, I presume Nakor will try to defend a bit better this time, just because he ruins all his future games if he doesn't... But maybe there is another suitable target nearby .

[mackoti]

I supose is not a spoiler anymore, and if it is if i want i can present it anyway, in that Ha rus i had another 9 axes and i think 8 or 10 cats(dont remeber exaclty) so nope for a complet anihilation of an oponenet i would never recomand just Ha, casue spear get great odds on them and can be easily whiped even in rb mod.Well if Nakor is neighbour..., might work.

Hey, any chance you want to dedlurk us Mackoti we can offer... um... well... er... I guess arguments over hammers and food is all we've got .

Just for a little bit more spoiler info - how many HA's did you have at the time? I didn't realise you'd got cats too - but as Fintourist says it was the speed and disguise of your initial strike that did for m_h, the rest was almost inevitable once you'd chopped his empire in half...

BTW we've got a list of neighbours we'd like a bit further up, I presume Nakor will try to defend a bit better this time, just because he ruins all his future games if he doesn't... But maybe there is another suitable target nearby .

Who can dedlurk in a game like this?Is imposible, i think i had 12 Ha , 10 on front and few comming from behind, i know is not much but for that time wasa huge army....
About cities, i think you want 3-4 with more then one resources for heavy cotagging and rest 1 food enoug for 1 pop whip...

[Fintourist]

i think i had 12 Ha , 10 on front and few comming from behind, i know is not much but for that time wasa huge army....

Yeah, I think at that time your civ, our civ and suttree were the top 3 at soldier points, all clearly above rival average. 10 HAs sounds like a nice force for the initial attack, probably less would have done the job, but I'm sure you had do have some room if m_h had guessed the attack and started whipping spears.

[Fintourist]

Turns 7-8

We did not get the promised BW, but a decent amount of gold:




67 gold is a great result, but somehow my hopes are always so high for a good tech.. But we uncovered awesome food resources!!

Man, this is just a totally different world compared to our PB13 land. In PB13 we had one single 6-foodhammer land resource (5/1 grass hill pigs that we got with our 6th city) that didn't need Civil Service or city razing.. How many can you count here? 5! (if you notice wet corn right in the SW corner of the pic). That's a 400 % increase already!

This creates a positive problem, there are so many different ways to dot-map this depending how one values short-term vs long-term returns. Our immediate starting position was so straight-forward and tech choices clear that there has been no need for sandboxing, but I guess once we manage to reveal couple more tiles in the east it is time to get going.. I've already asked OH to clear his schedule so that he can spend couple of days testing different approaches..

EDIT: In case OH, THH or someone else wants to try this start, here is an updated version of the sandbox. (I added the most relevant areas)

[Fintourist]

I could not help myself and did a quick sandbox run until T51. I played highly sub-optimally, but still had:
4 cities all working an improved food tile
5 workers
6 warriors
So yeah, IMP makes life kind of easy and this is thousand times faster than in PB13.

Worker techs are a true problem though and we would really benefit from a useful tech (BW, Wheel, Agri, AH, even Fishing..).. If we don't get lucky our opening will be ugly in one way or another.

[Fintourist]

Turn 9

I really should not bother with sandboxing because every turn seems to change the situation..




I actually sandboxed quite a bit and thought that I came up with a clever way to organize micro when settling corn+sheep in the west first, but now these cows really change everything again.. Positive problems!

I'm pretty sure our 2nd or 3rd city will go up to cows+corn, some minor thoughts about possible spots:
- A would be an absolutely awesome moai city
- A&B can build a lighthouse, which makes those lake tiles a lot more powerful
- B&C get immediate trade route to our capital via river, A gets it latest ~T50 when capital borders pop.
- C can share pigs with our capital and is so far pretty much the only spot for our 2nd city, which keeps our empire compact. However, it leaves corn in the 2nd ring and unworked for quite a long time and makes coastal settling a lot more difficult.

I took a minor risk with the scout move, let's just assume that there isn't any wolfs panthers in fog and in range to kill our hero. Because we really really need 1 useful tech..

EDIT: Updated Sandbox

[Fintourist]

Turn 10




Aaaand more food! Aaaand more dot-mapping/sandboxing trouble..

Buddhism also fell. Just for the record we would have been one turn short if we had tried. We are working a 1-commerce tile, but you need to have a 2-commerce tile to finish Meditation EOT9 or have some kind of magical capital tile (growing immediately to size 2 and then working two 1-commerce tiles would not have been enough either). So yeah, there were several score increases this turn and of those both Q and Brickdoc start with Mysticism + Fishing... I hope Q got the religion, otherwise Brickdoc's 2 techs from huts + religion start just makes me too jealous.

Btw, when I was dreaming of getting BW from the hut I entertained a thought of putting couple of turns into Polytheism so that we could react if nobody lands Polytheism in couple of turns. Well, it never happened, we most certainly can't afford Polytheism now and I would bet that someone from this crowd is going for it anyways.

Next move SE-X?

SE-NE would give us a nice overview of the coast and reveal the missing tile, but we might be able to cover it later with a warrior. So, depending on landscape we go SE-E or SE-SE.. Cross your fingers for a new hut and BW/Agri/Wheel....

[mackoti]

I always said , imperilast is very good(if not the best) if you have 4 cities very good to expand and loosk like you have here and fin for more cotage spam, so yeah i think you could be in avery strong position to get some first bonuses, becasue is alot about that.

[Fintourist]

I always said , imperilast is very good(if not the best) if you have 4 cities very good to expand and loosk like you have here and fin for more cotage spam, so yeah i think you could be in avery strong position to get some first bonuses, becasue is alot about that.

Yep, we don't have yet any idea how much room we have for ourselves, but we definitely try to use IMP for grabbing a decent amount of land. I did a test run yesterday and I think I settled my 6th city on T62, had granaries in 4 first cities, cottages growing etc. It will all change as we explore more and get to see strategic resources, but overall this land quality is just a lot better compared to what we had in PB13 and expansion-wise we should be ~15 turns ahead compared to our performance there already by T60 (I wonder if we are lucky or if everyone has good starts). As you said, spamming cottages is essential so that we can afford to just expand and expand.. Sacrificial Altars should also be very useful later..