Note that I did that the turn before and by now I have some new information, which I will describe.
I agree with you about the west. For me the main point of not settling the plains hill is because it denies some city sites in the north of it. I also have Red as #2 and yellow as #3 city for all the reasons you already explained.
I definitely want to settle the strong fortress city on the hill 1E of stone (dark blue). This is a very good stronghold, because of the flat tiles east of it. In addition I found a banana resource 1NE of it last turn, which is why this is such a strong production site. If need be it can also supply the sea north of it with ships via a canal-fortress.
Pink/violet in the south of the stronghold is I think the better spot for the sheep city. It can still share the fish, but it also picks up more hills (production) and the lake (lighthouse obviously).
Black dot is a better city then 1SW of it, because it gets more hammers, can share the sugar and the lake. I also have some additional information here too. I found forested fur 1E1SE of the fish. It looks like that is an island, but more exploration will be necessary.
In the north I like the brown spot a lot more then a city 1SE of it. It gets immediate access to corn, another floodplain and access to the wine. And of course 2 lake tiles as extra food with a lighthouse. What I don't like about a city 1SE of it is that as soon as an enemy caputeres that city, they will get immediate access to my interrior via the city and the lakes.
Turquoise dot is quite similar to your yellow dots as it gets almost the same resources except for the incense of your southern yellow dot. Of course the downside of this city is that it needs a border pop to get to its food resources. But if I settle other cities first then this won't be a problem. We need Iron Working anyway for the gems, so I don't think there is immediate need to settle this as #4.
Violet dot north of the gold misses the gems, but this isn't important. It's more important that this city can be a good production spot. With 3 hills, cow, and river tiles for watermills it can provide that. Of course it too takes up a lake with a lighthouse.
This plan leaves only one dot unmarked. There can be another city 1E of the deer or 1NE of the incense. I think I will go with the 1E of deer spot and settle this as #4. Thanks to the capitals border pop it will get access to the corn. It will serve as an important stepping stone to the east and with a border pop it will provide the pig for the Turquoise dot.
This plan leaves me with 11 main-land cities and and additional 3 or 4 island cities.
My main ruffle with your south-eastern dotmap (pink/black) is that we can't settle "my" Grey Dot (9 of corn), which is the only city that manages to achieve all of overlapping the deer, first-ring corn, and second-ring sheep. That would likely be one of our strongest early core cities, even if it results in weaker fillers surrounding it (1 of Black Dot is pretty damn worthless without Colossus, yeah), and it supports a push eastward better than anything else, including by sheer location. Early/late trade-off; difficult to say what we need. I'm fine with either plan, and would favour yours more the longer that Grey Dot is delayed; this leads into the next point.
My issue with Turquoise (apart from being a possible flatland border city) is that it leaves us with no site whatsoever to settle the pig hill first-ring, except by killing the incense, and that not settling that pig hill early (#4 or #5, at the latest, imo) will seriously hamper our ability to contest the north, which I think will be as crucial as Violet Stronghold. I strongly suggest moving Turquoise 3, even if that kills the lake for lighthousing.edit: 3 is good with Grey Dot, but it has to be 33 (probably followed by 888 of it) if we dismiss Grey Dot in favour of Black.
Lighthoused lakes are cute and contribute "free value" at any seafood-using site, but I think those "oases" are not better tiles than cottages, except in the short term. Or with Colossus, but even then I'd be fine with yielding 2 food on the Great Lake long-term in exchange for working a 6fh tile (i.e. pig hill) 10t sooner in the ~T50-70 stretch and for being able to contest our northern neighbor (whose presence I'm taking as a certainty) that much better. If east-of-deer city is made holy or such, everything changes, of course.
Moving Turquoise 3 would also invalidate Brown Dot, but Brown might be better situated 7 of its current location as the new potential border city -- I believe that wouldn't even kill NE Wine Island, because min city settling distance does not apply across continents (but please verify this).
If you don't move Turquoise, I think Brown Dot should be 1S, even if that permits "lake tunneling" as you described; the production will be meaningfully stronger with the cow and extra hill, same argument as with Purple. If opponents can take our coastal cities at will, things are looking dire anyway. Also, basing one's own fleet in a lake is probably the safest position for it (until the access city gets razed lol, but yeah that's still better because that same surprise raze would delete the fleet instead), although I'm expecting that Black Lake will be the one to do that, if any; who knows, though.
I think you're right that western Purple is much better where you put it, separating rather than hybridizing the hammer and commerce cities in that area.
The newly-discovered fur might be an argument to move sheep city 6, unless that's the first island we settle (Black Dot already lighthouses the lake). Obviously, we should settle exactly one island city for ICTR before we're boxed in on land. Which one will be decided by neighbor info. "When" is also an interesting question, but impossible to predict now, I think. edit: Sheep City 6 would also allow moving Black Dot 6, claiming sheep early. I think that would be better (treating sheep city as filler, because it is; loses fish and sugar but I'm somewhat concerned which food resource Clock Town will actually retain)
While we're on canals, my meme dream is Western Purple -- 9 (fort) -- 3 -- 6 (fort) -- 3 (Not Turquoise) -- 6 -- 6 -- 9 (fort). Not sure if even legal.
Next time I log in I will explore the north and the fur tile some more via the flying camera. I should be able to clarify what is there. With two jungle bridges to the west and east I somewhat suspect that there might be another to the north. With that info we can make a better judgment of the northern dotmap. Therefore I will react to everything concerning that after I explored there, but one thing I can say already. I agree with you that moving brown 1S is a better city spot.
Don't worry about the island cities. There is no distance check between cities on different landmasses.
One thing we can't forget that by moving sheep city 1E it may be able to work the fur, but without a city on that landmass, we can't connect the fur with our trade system. So if this turns out to be a two tile island for example, we will most likely settle that island and the island city will work the fur.
Also: I had the same idea about this canal route and tested it. It works! But I doubt we need it. There should be an easier canal with possible with the lake N of the floodplains.
To me the tile-bleed looked like the north will not be jungled, but forested -- thus the main area of early border negotiation. Also, this is pointing out the obvious, but the land bridge looks to be twice as wide, which I'm taking as a clue to the same effect.
This makes me so keen to push for #4 at pig hill as well as an early warrior into that area, if the scout doesn't wheel around soon (doesn't look like he should).
With the furs, I think it will be the other way around: sheep city will be geared for research infrastructure (particularly if we get Colossus) and should therefore work the furs; the island city is settled once we actually need the fur to provide happiness. That seems less important, we have so many other sources.
Looks like there is a thicker jungle between players, which is good for peaceful development and being pink dotted is less of a danger. There's a panther there, but thanks to the extra +100% vs animals from Hunting and the other modifiers it is very unlikely that the scout dies.
As you can see there are more land tiles for the fur island. So that's where my flying camera exploration comes in.
These are the possible terrain tiles for the fur island. Of course I can only know if it is flat, hills or mountains via flying camera. To me it looked like an island, but of course there could be more tiles on the diagnoals that I marked with a triangle. Those are harder to find. I also investigated the land south of the capitol, which also looks like an island to me. There could be tiles on the diagonals again marked with triangles. Which brings us the important investigation.
I'm fairly certain that all the non-desert tiles are correct in elevation. The desert tiles are a mystery and the can either be water or land tiles. I did not find any jungle in the north. It really could be that the land ends up there.
Just went in after I did some testflights in my sim. Now I'm very much convinced that there is no land bridge to the north, meaning all desert tiles in the above image are water tiles. There is more land in the north, but it is not connected to my land, but reachable via coast.
I figured it might be nice to explain how I get that map knowledge via the flying camera for all those newer players. So here is my introduction to the arcane art of flying camera exploration (FCE)
Before I can explain anything, we first need to activate the flying camera mode. Here a short explanation:
You need to open your CivilizationIV.ini file in any text editor. This file is here "Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword", but location may vary with different versions. In that file look for:
Code:
; Allow Camera Flying
AllowFlying = 0
There just change the 0 to a 1 and save.
From now on you should be able to activate the mode with CTRL+ALT+F, but like with other shortcuts this shortcut may vary depending on your keyboard layout.
In the mode you can move via the arrow keys forward and backward and doing sidesteps to the left and right. With the mouse you can move the view direction.
1. First thing that I always do with FCE is to activate bare map display and the show tiles (tile lines) option. I also activate show resources. With those options you can see everything clearly and can orientate yourself in the fog of war. You will notice that I always show a view of the map with my viewpoint. This should help you orientate and understand what is happening.
2. Taking the exploration of my north as an example, I first fly to this position:
Here I am looking from the north to the south. I start to align myself so that I am parallel with the tile lines.
3. Next I start decending by going forward and backward on the spot until I'm underneath the land, but still above the ocean floor. You notice that you are in the right spot, when you break through the ground. This will look something like this:
4. From here I align my view so that I'm parallel to the land and start moving backwards, always taking care that I stay underneath the land and above the ocean floor. The presence of forests in the fog of war makes this a lot easier as you see the trees from underneath in black:
5. Now it gets a bit more complicated. If you continue moving backwards like in #4 at some point everything might turn black like here:
The moment everything turns black is when move from a land tile into a water tile. At the edge of these tiles the land drops into the ocean floor. What actually happens is that by moving backwards you break through this drop, which is the falling land. Everything turns black because you now see this drop of the land.
6. Here are some more examples of things you may see.
Here we look into the lake still underneath the land.
And here we've broken through the hill into a water tile. You can see the hill contour against the brightly lit trees in the background.
7. Lastly here we brake through the land into the water behind the lake.
It's a bit harder to judge how many tiles you moved, but if you train moving across visibile land you can get a feeling of how far you moved in the darkness.
8. Now it gets really complicated. We try to determine if the are additional tiles in the diagonales. We start with the position from #7. There we can make sidesteps to the right with right arrow key until we enter the next tile. If there is land on the next tile you normally break through the landfall again. This may result into the following image:
It's barely visible in the screenshot, but a little bit better while moving. For a better screenshot we do the same for the left.
We are looking for a diagonale line like the one in red. This is the landfall we are looking for. The nearby lake makes this search a lot easier. If we don't have any uncovered water tiles in the direction we are looking, we would have no chance of finding the diagonale tiles.
Don't be afraid if you fail at step #8. It's the hardest part of all of this. In fact because this is the hardest part, I will check this once again in the game, just to be sure.
No image this time, because there is nothing new to see. The stupid panther managed to drop the scout to 0.4 even though it only had odds of 3. I will heal for a few turns until it is safe to continue scouting. Human barbarians will appear with T20 so I will most likely not heal to full, because my scout stands no chance against most of them anyway.
Looked again at the north with FCE. Still convinced that there is no additional land connection there.
Here is my idea for a dotmap:
as well as an early warrior into that area, if the scout doesn't wheel around soon (doesn't look like he should).
