Advice on a fishing start.

[flugauto]

I say settler first.

[Krill]

Either chop with BW first, or farm the flood plain and rice with Agriculture first.

The start does have everything to make use of a Fishing start... except actual fish. Clams really aren't a strong tile -- weaker than the cows that you're always hating on.

This needs full micromanagement simulation to be sure; the various paths are too close to gauge accurately with generalistic rules and hunches.

I like cows. I just hate teching to AH because of the cost, and here that's a good 25 turns away. I'd easily bet 50 bucks that agriculture first is the wrong play here, but you need to set an aim. Is it getting the second city down? The only viable second city location you can see is 998, overlaps cow and clam. BTW, BW takes 15 turns, worker only takes 13 to get onto the forest...

With IMP, you are looking at a two pop whip for that settler, so size 4 asap is the aim, and you don't need many warriors for defence, probably only one more. I can get two settlers out of that start, along with three work boats and a worker, well before T40.

[Thoth]

Either chop with BW first, or farm the flood plain and rice with Agriculture first.

The start does have everything to make use of a Fishing start... except actual fish. Clams really aren't a strong tile -- weaker than the cows that you're always hating on.

This needs full micromanagement simulation to be sure; the various paths are too close to gauge accurately with generalistic rules and hunches.

Clams aren't very strong, but they are coastal and are better than either the 4f/0 commerce dry Rice and the worker turn intensive 4f/1c Floodplains farm.

I haven't run the numbers but my gut still says Bronze/ag/husbandry while building WB/WB to size 2/whip worker/wb/warriors to size 4/2 pop whip settler is likely the strongest overall opening.

I strongly dislike wb openings in most cases when there are good land tiles available, but here the best land tile is a 4/0/1 tile with a 4/0/0. Unless the opening tech path runs AG/AH which opens up the Cows as a very nice 3f/3h tile. But this delays Bronze and costs early beakers vs the WB start.

Bah.

Who wants to do up a sandbox?

[Krill]

EDIT: Bah, mine got deleted...