[Spoilers] GES, Roland & Friends (Mansa of Egypt)

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Obviously we may need fishing or hunting or who knows what. I am just saying, our first long term tech priority I think should be Code of Laws, although I am open to other suggestions. The map will dictate a lot.

Shrines are good because they help spread the religion without having to invest hammers in missionaries and for the extra gold, which is very valuable to offset expansion costs. If the goal is to expand horizontally at a 30% (or lower) slider until the horizontal limits are reached, then Academies don't become super valuable until a little later. Binary is just a trick to avoid beaker rounding errors and to hold your gold in case you need to change tech options on the fly--it doesn't actually change your slider rate. If you run 30% slider, or two turns of gold and one turn of research, it doesn't change the numbers much I don't think.

Personally, I dig an early settled GProphet, but it helps to know where the shrine city will be first, because it is good to get the 5 gpt of the settled GProphet multiplied by market, grocer, bank, and Wall Street. Given that we are founding a later religion (hopefully), that might not be possible.

If you have a gmail acct, just send me an email and I'll add you to my chat list.

[Gaspar]

Here is your starting position, have fun.



Reload, that was a slightly older version of the same picture.

[Brian Shanahan]

Interesting start, the 2 pastured sheep are 4f1h1g, with a riverside bonus to the eastern one of an extra gold. The corn is 5/0/0 so it is a good food start.

As regards the settler he's on a plains hill, so an extra hammer there. You're also four tiles away from the coast, which is to the north, and looks very straight. It's also a hilly start, but a bit short on early forests for chopping.

I'd suggest moving the warrior NE onto the hill, and seeing there before playing, but SIP is definitely viable IMO.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I would think settle in place and begin teching Animal Husbandry, which will also show us horsies for our first settler. Probably doesn't really matter whether we do AH or Mining first though. Since the first worker will farm the corn, the sheep won't get pastured until after AH is teched anyway probably.

Being four tiles away from the coast is good because we can squeeze in another coastal city or two, whereas if we settle too close to coast, we lose a few city spots. With financial, the coast is viable.

With the plains hill start and the sheep hammers, it might be worth saving the chops until Math comes in. There should be enough early production at that site, as once the three food tiles are worked, we should +9 fpt and 4hpt. That is damn near a three turn worker and five turn settler at size 3, even without the whip.

Also, the riverside sheep I think should become 4/1/3 with financial bonus, which is sick.

Probably want to grow to size 4, double whip a settler, immediately regrow to size 3, slow build a worker, rinse & repeat for 50+ turns.

The river is good for financial. Cramming in a couple of close cities that could share food (especially on the sheep/corn side) while developing river cottages could well end up being good plays.

Early tech plans: AH-->Mining-->Bronze Working-->Pottery

Could pick up Fishing for the second city if seafood, or could head right for Code of Laws after that.

[scooter]

Well that works nicely. My only complaint is that I wish the Corns were irrigated, but such is life. Other than that, it makes me happy to see three visible rivers. Glad we picked Financial. Settle in place is obviously a must unless that warrior finds something incredible.

The two real options for tech is:

AH->Mining->BW->Pottery or Mining->BW->AH->Pottery

The former is probably the better move, although the case for the latter is that you could whip sooner and simply farm the corn/floodplains (eventually cottaging over the FP once you hooked other food) for your food surplus and whip away. My hunch is that AH first is the best, but BW before AH is plausible I guess. Not sure if it's worth sandboxing and figuring it out though.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I plan on posting a sandbox tonight if I can.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

If anybody wants to play around with the start, I made a sandbox for it. It was my first ever attempt with Worldbuilder, so who knows how it went.

Save: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25875988/PBEM19%...dSwordSave

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I haven't experimented too much, but if you farm the corn, pasture the two sheep, and build a mine on the grass hill (rather than cottage the FP), that seemed to maximize worker/settler production.

Basically, once a granary is in place, you grow to size 4, put two turns into a settler, whip, put one turn of overflow into a worker, grow the following two turns, then you can finish the worker in 1 turn instead of 2 by working the grass mine at size 4, then put two turns into the settler and whip again.

This uses the whip every seven turns and produces a worker and settler every seven turns while working 3-5 cpt too.

With tightened micro, this could mean something like five settlers, 5-6 workers, and five warriors around the 50 turn mark out of the capital.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I just got a granary, 3 warriors, 6 workers, and 4 settlers from the capital by T50 without whipping once, and only putting two chops into the granary (which really was unnecessary under this scenario). This was working a FP cottage and grass mine at size. This option alternated 6-7 turns to produce a settler/worker combo.

Another option is to grow to size five and work two mines instead of the floodplains cottage, and this produced an endless stream of 2 turn workers and 4 turn settlers. So every six turns, it made a worker/settler pair. I think I had 2 warriors, 5 workers, and 5 settlers from the capital with this strategy at T50.

The negative to not whipping is that you don't get the 2 turns of production poured into other items while growing. The positive is that you can either develop a FP cottage into village status and match the worker/settler production from the whip, or work two mines and outproduce the most effective whipping in terms of workers and settlers (I think).

My tech path was AH-->Mining-->BW--Pottery

An option if going the no whip strategy is to ignore pottery and head down the religion line to grab an early religion (or two) and shrine both of them.

Anyway, I will play with it more before playing tomorrow. If I could get some of you guys to play around and give me some input, that would be good. My micro was very loose on each of my three experimental runs.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Turn 0:

Moved the warrior, didn't find any more resources, so I settled in place. Easy decision.

Revealed jungle gems. Gaspar is a dick. He wants people to war, so he gave us a reason to tech IW early. He probably put copper underneath the jungle grass hill.

I can see that all six of the defogged northern tiles are coastal. It looks to me like the coast line curves north on the eastern most tile, but I am not completely sure. With coast on both sides, we may be safe from an early rush.

There is also coast in the south that you can see in the first screenshot.

Overall, an absolute ton of hills so far. I hope there are more food resources to be found out in the fog, or this could be some slow developing land. Seems like this could be an archipelago map, which I am not that excited about. I don't really dig naval combat on this game. It is a pure numbers game.

City screen:

Set tech on Animal Husbandry, due in 7 turns. Building a worker, due in 8 turns.