RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[SleepingMoogle]

I got the same error Mania, no problems the second time around though. Weird. But it looks like other teams are experiencing the same thing. There were a lot of messages of other players failing to join.

Anyway, I don't think the tiles to the south are tundra tiles. It's hard to tell in the screenshot, but ingame both tiles look like grassland hills to me. Besides, the forest tiles in the fog to our north appear to be pine trees, while the trees around our starting position appear to be regular ones.
That grassland silver is interesting. Perhaps other teams will have a happiness resource covered by jungle as well? It could be a reason to persue Iron Working quickly at least, though we may as well settle on it instead.

Our current position gives us a fairly large amount of river tiles (although a fair number are either plains or hill tiles), river sheep and rice, and grassland river silver later on. There's also a nice amount of forests to chop. There's 5 tiles that are still covered by fog; as best as I can make out, they are river grassland and river plains covered with a forest on our left, and a plains, grassland and grassland forest to our right.

For now, moving our Warrior SW onto the Plains hill seems like the best move. We'll probably get vision on a large amount of tiles that way, and depending on what we find, we could consider moving our Settler that way as well.

[Bobchillingworth]

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of settling either the plains hill or the silver. That also puts us on a river which helps for leeves way later.

[ManiaMuse]

Settling on the silver could make sense. We would lose 1 riverside grassland, 1 grassland, 2 grasslands that we aren't sure are riverside or not (1 forested) and a plains (riverside unknown) for a riverside/plains/forest/hill, 2 riverside grasslands, and two mystery tiles. The early happiness boost could be pretty useful.

On the other hand we would lose the commerce boost which being financial is worth even more than usual. Hmm, I wonder what the lurkers think if there are any around yet...

I think we should move the warrior onto the SW hill.

[SleepingMoogle]

The land to our west is.. not that great.

[novice]

I wonder what the lurkers think if there are any around yet...

I'm making the rounds.

My initial reaction when I saw your starting screenshot was to settle 1SW on the forest plains hill. That looks extremely strong to me. So I would move the warrior east or southeast to see if anything could change my mind.

EDIT: Okay, so don't listen to me
Well, the west is a disappointment but the plains hill gives a nice boost in the early game. I'd still be inclined to settle on it, but now you don't know what you lose in the east. Maybe you can tell from tile bleeding, I'm not too good at that.

[Bobchillingworth]

Thanks for posting, novice!


That's one of the 3 sites we're currently discussing in groupchat- the sentiment against that location is that it is commerce and food-poor, and we want to explot financial as much as possible. Also we lose a forest that way.

[novice]

Well you'll have three river grasslands and a non-river grassland for cottages, plus the two food resources and the silver, that's enough for the early game. After that it's on to mined hills and cottaged plains. I guess if you're married to the idea of a bureaucracy and academy-fueled übercapital it's not ideal - but what are the alternatives anyway?

Pre-monarchy your capital will rock and you can configure it for high commerce or high production.

You can always look for a commerce capital downriver or upriver for your second city.

[SleepingMoogle]

Thanks a lot for the advise Novice. Putting the capital on the SW hill would make for a pretty food-poor city though, so we decided against it. We also talked about moving our Settler to the E or SE hill to see what was on the other side, but ultimately settled in place, which probably was a good thing:



Not too much to our Plains to the east, and a desert to the SE. On the bright side though, once our borders expand other teams won't have visibility on our captial from any diagonal.

Worker and Agriculture queued for now. I propose moving our Warrior S, SE over the next two turns to see what's to the south. Our border expansion will defog quite some tiles to our NW by itself already.

I didn't finish the turn yet. If you're both finished, please feel free to.

[Bobchillingworth]

Ah, I was going to post our gigantic chat log here, but it was a little too large to justify a post.


Essentially, for any and all lurking, we debating four settling locations. The first was one the plains hill to the sw, which would have been an excellent production site, but too commerce and food poor to justify our strategy of rapid teching to guilds; if we were Rome and had our UU earlier than I think we may have favored the spot, but as it is we really need the commerce at the moment.

Another spot considered was on top of the silver. I suspect that most / all other teams also have a precious gems / metal resource, and that some of them will settle on top of theirs. It would give us a boost to our happy cap with mining, but would mean sacrificing a terrain with the strength of a late-game grassland town. Since we need iron to get our UU and therefore want to know where it is on the map early on, we decided that it made more sense to save the tile for research purposes. Also, moving onto the gems would have led to fewer grassland tiles in the long run, which was not ideal. We don't plan on moving our capital for a long time (if ever) and so we want it to be as strong a location as possible.

A third site would have been on the hill se of our position. That spot would have been strategically easier to defend, but we didn't know much about the surrounding terrain; as it was unlikely that we would have gained a 4th resource and nothing to make up for the lost river grasslands or lost turn, it made more sense to settle in place. Now that we have some visibility over the area I think that it wouldn't have been a bad move, but also not a substantial improvement over what we have now, assuming we aren't going to have to fight some very early defensive action.

The final spot was to settle in place; we ended up doing so because the starting location has the best commercial potential of all the locations and some excellent production features as well. The biggest downside is that every square but two bordering our capital provides a defensive bonus to an attack, meaning that they can choke us fairly easily. Hopefully it won't come down to that; regardless, we are going to want chopping fairly soon. The provisional tech path at the moment is agr --> animal husbandry --> mining --> bronze working --> Pottery (?). That should set us up for a very high production start, and the sheep will supply 3 gold with financial, which is great for (very) early researching.

[Bobchillingworth]

For the starting warrior I say either SW --> SE or NW --> W (or N)