Spoilers! Time For A Change. ( superdeath spoilers )

[Gavagai]

Wow, he is close. Mids into police state into HAs is my first thought. Oracle is probably not an option because Donovan is playing this.
I will post my thoughts about the dotmap later.

[Gavagai]

OK, HA rush is a bad idea.
1) Most probably there is another neighbor behind Elkad. I got burnt heavily by a similar assumption in PB38 but what is the likelihood that a mapmaker will fuck up twice. In that case, we will get a problematic position after we kill him.
2) Lots of good land to settle peacefully, we don't really have to do it.
3) It is very micro-intensive and you can't do micro.
Another plan: build up a tech lead and go to war at Knights/Musketeers era. Under this plan we build Mids and run Representation, philosophical trait is leveraged into an early academy and then an early Civil Service bulb. Capital is fully cottaged, everything else is on specialists/production/growth cycle. Early CoL, so we are likely to get Confu naturally but we will shrine it only eventually with Angkor: this is our late-game plan. Expansive is used to get cheaper workers and to stabilize quickly after the conquest. The most important thing here is not to overexpand, taking only spots we really need to reach Guilds. We can take everything else by sword later, trusting our neighbors to expand in vacuum and crush their economies (Emperor maintanance!). Another important thing is to keep good relationships with neighbors as we would want to be running caste since early.

[Gavagai]

Logged into the game. Your dotmap is good. I sugget slotting in an additional city between Gold and Cow in the west and maybe move westernmost city further to the west to make a room for nice cottage center 1S of furs later in the game. The order must be 1) Corn city, 2) Sheep city, 3) Stone city.
Also, my advice is not to make contact with Elkad and move our scout back. We will not be settling our planned border city soon, the later he learns of our presence, the better. We have learnt all we needed to know about SW direction, now we need to scout W and NW.

[superdeath]

how much worse is emp maintenance over monarch? Are we going to be able to settle 7 cities before currency? Id like to reach for the ivory/floodplains asap, but can do it after stone city if we want to start mids nice and early. I suppose we want the capital pumping nothing but workers/settlers, and thats why Corn city over Sheep city.. due to not sharing the capital corn?

[superdeath]

Then again, if copper pops somewhere do we need to rush to it fast vs emp barbs? Or will a quick hunting-archery after BW be good enough?

[Gavagai]

1) On Emperor the maintenance is noticeably higher than on Monarch. On this map, however, it should not matter, we have tons of commerce.
2) Ivory/floods is too far away to settle as a third city, we need lots of workers and military to support it. Generally, settling first cities beyond the first ring around the capital is inadvisable.
3) Fogbusting should work against barbs, I think...
4) It will be a while until we can split of the Corn, yeah. I actually thought about moving Sheep city 1N to grab the stone into its second ring and giving capital Corn to a silver city directly to the east but this city is too bad. We are not going to settle it until much later.
5) Corn city should be second because:
- It adds us a stronger food resource (Corn vs Sheep)
- It allows us to start working cottages on floods earlier

[Gavagai]

Concerning barbs: I would very surprised if they will be a problem here. The map is crowded and lots of water around, they should not have much space to spawn.

[superdeath]

Would it be wise/ok to settle Ivory/floods as the 4th city? before the stone city? With corn-Sheep-Ivory/floods? or should we settle stone before it?

Hopeful that the silver has some food it can use.

Yeah, i can agree now that corn can be city 2. Considering the current naming scheme, got a particular serial killer in mind? Otherwise ill be going down a huge list. Tech path mining-bw, do we go hunting-archery for safety/the sheep? Or go pottery before that?

[Gavagai]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo - a serial killer for you

In respect to early Ivory city - why exactly do you want to settle it early?
About techpath - need to think and maybe test. The main question is whether we would actually be able to use Pottery if we research it right after BW.

[superdeath]

Thanks! 2nd city name confirmed then.

In regards to the ivory city, its on a hill, surrounded by lush land. It feels like a border/contested area. With us going for the mid's i dont want us to lose out on the really good borderlands. I can be convinced otherwise, but our stone city would be our "border" city on flatground, if there is a neighbor up there.

Depends on how many workers we want to push out. 2-1 ratio? more? less?