[Spoilers] Gavagai, Bacchus and Elizabeth Form a Romantic Trio

[Gavagai]

Fair points. And Pericles/Egypt combo definitely has a feeling of some kind of plan behind it

[Gavagai]

England is ours... And wtf, Mehmed of Mongols - this guy is really out to break some sculls. But if you want to take Mongols for some reason, you would want a char leader. Washington would be a good pick. And then - Victoria of Zulu. Well, another person I would prefer to have on another continent.

[Bacchus]

Well, there sure is a lot of weirdness going round. I don't really like this set-up — there are both really strong picks, and picks which seem designed to make somebody's life a nightmare, whilst having relatively little chance of winning.

Sury and Mansa still have Rome, Maya, Byzantium, Korea, Greece and other greatness to choose from. Well, maybe Greece ain't so bad

[Bacchus]

So, some simming and microing showed that building out workers and chopping stuff from the get go doesn't actually speed things up that much, and we are far too short prod to be throwing it around. In a spirit of adventure, and based on the wonderful idea that with religion we don't need a happiness garrison at size 5, I knocked up the following cash-heavy microplan:



The best thing about this is that we knock out a cool 189 coins off the coast tiles and given that the only other financial fishing civilization is Sian, this will be nearly pure surplus over the opposition. The worst thing is that our third settler will depart somewhere around late-50's. But I don't think there are significantly better alternatives, one way or another we have to stomach the little Valley of Unlife between the time the forests are chopped and the time the second and third cities come properly online.

For fun's sake, teching can go Mysticism - Polytheism - BW - Wheel - Pottery - Worker tech, causing some serious "lolwhut" in the neighboring threads after the religion snatch goes public. What we really need is Monarchy.

[Gavagai]

This plan doesn't account for 2 turns of anarchy (swapping to slavery and converting to religion). So, we will actually have our first settler out on T38 only. Still can't say I'm sure that this plan is better than having 1-2 workers out first and chopping boats. What I like in this plan, however, is that our capital will never go below size 3, allowing to work all 3 clams non-stop. Still need to think this staff over. This actually may be its decisive advantage.

[Bacchus]

Well, getting pretty much the same speed, more gold and saving the forests sums up to a reasonable deal. I don't think the advantage with the late chopping is in expansion speed, if anything we might lose a little of it (I haven't microed early workers properly, so this is based on a very rough sim and general intuition), the lure is in getting a bigger tech lead and saving the chops for granary/library, or, чем черт не шутит, Stonehenge. There's more flexibility all around, whilst early chopping commits us to slightly murky waters.

[Gavagai]

OK, I have a completely different idea: go BW - the Wheel - Pottery and chop a granary in a capital before settlers. Of course, it will require to mix in some workers with WBs, may be whip one. Made some quick tests - it looks like we will have about the same stuff as per your plan by T50 but with granary already in place. We need to explore this option, I suppose.

[Gavagai]

1. Scrap my granary plan: early granary doesn't really help as happy becomes a terrible bottleneck. We really need this religion.
2. Your creative trick with working a grassland forest instead of a grassland hill while building our first WB doesn't work: we will have an additional food, additional hammer and additional three commerce by T12 if we straight up work a hill. It is much closer than one would intuitevely assume though; and really a pity because people would think that we were growing on a floodplain while slow-building something and that we are totally nuts. Of course, myst -> poly opening would only confirm this opinion.
(Feel free to check my calculations, however, I did them inside my head while gowing to work.)

Hm, checked my calculations regarding the second point - it looks like I was wrong and working grassland forest is better than working a hill. We can gain two food at the expanse of one hammer or three commerce by T11. Wow.

[Gavagai]

Also, am I correct that your table assumes growth to size 6 without a warrior built for MP? It will cause unhappiness even with religion present.

[Gavagai]

I think we should try the following: built three WBs while growing to size 5, than build the first worker and whip the second one. Than chop/build a settler and two warriors while growing back to size 5. Than whip another worker, chop fourth worker, chop settler/warriors again. Then whip the third settler (from size 5 for 2 pop or from size 6 for three).
We need to check if it will be possible to complete this sequence by about T60. If it is possible, than this is the way to go.